formerly,

The Llano Ledger

"Last May, officials in
Midlothian, Tex., a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in
tax breaks for a huge, mysterious new development across from a shuttered
Toys R’ Us warehouse. That day was the first time officials had spoken
publicly about an enigmatic developer’s plans to build a sprawling data
center. The developer, which incorporated with the state four months earlier,
went by the name Sharka LLC. City officials declined at the time to say
who was behind Sharka. The mystery company was Google — a fact the city
revealed two months later, after the project was formally approved. Larry
Barnett, president of Midlothian Economic Development, one of the agencies
that negotiated the data center deal, said he knew at the time the tech
giant was the one seeking a decade of tax giveaways for the project, but
he was prohibited from disclosing it because the company had demanded secrecy."

Forget? The corporate
management suite runs and owns its bought and paid for lackeys in government.

“I’m confident that had
the community known this project was under the direction of Google, people
would have spoken out, but we were never given the chance to speak,” said
Travis Smith, managing editor of the Waxahachie Daily Light, the local
paper. “We didn’t know that it was Google until after it passed.” After
the deal went through, Sharka changed its main address to that of Google’s
headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Site work began last fall."

This out of control corporation
presents an exigent threat to privacy, liberty, all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties.

Here's the problem:

"Google — which has risen
to become one of the world’s most valuable companies by transforming the
public’s ability to access information — has vastly expanded its geographic
footprint over the past decade, building more than 15 data centers on three
continents and 70 offices worldwide. But that development spree has often
been shrouded in secrecy, making it nearly impossible for some communities
to know, let alone protest or debate, who is using their land, their resources
and their tax dollars until after the fact, according to Washington Post
interviews and newly-released public records obtained through a freedom
of information act request."

This out of control behemoth
corporation not only makes its money off your private information, but
receives corporate welfare from tax abatement at the very least.

"With their growing reach
into the U.S. economy and in the face of greater political scrutiny, tech
giants including Google and Amazon are on a tear to expand — but communities
now see their arrival more skeptically for the disruption, environmental
impact and higher cost of living they often bring, as well as the incentives
they seek, despite their deep pockets."

... Hear the rumble?
An unwanted dreaded second American revolution catastrophically looming.

"Local officials say they
are pressed to maintain secrecy to lure powerful tech companies, who wish
to avoid controversies and keep details about their operations under wraps.
On Thursday that ability to play hardball was on full display after Amazon
pulled the plug on plans to build a sprawling new campus in New York City
rather than endure further public criticism of the project."

F--k these bastards.
So too local officials who sell out their communities to these greedy corporate
behemoths. Have to wonder how much they receive in kickbacks.

"Amazon’s year-long search
for a second headquarters was criticized for its use of confidentiality
agreements that were so restrictive that officials couldn’t comment on
their existence, and for playing cities against one another in a quest
for government incentives. Even after pulling out of New York, the Seattle-based
company is slated to take in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks
when it builds its second headquarters in Northern Virginia. (Jeffrey P.
Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.) Some New York
lawmakers were so outraged by the secrecy of Amazon’s process that they
have introduced bills that would ban nondisclosure agreements for development
projects in the city and state."

Goes without saying.
Why weren't these laws already on the books? Could it be the kickbacks
received discouraged such?

Report goes on and on.
Likely, only scratches the surface of the problem. Clearly, our legislators
and other officials have sold us out. Lined their pockets.
At our expense.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-21-18

Facebook continues its
assault on privacy. NPR reports:

"Facebook employees talk
to visitors at a one-day Facebook pop-up kiosk in Bryant Park in New York
City on Thursday. The company was fielding questions about its data-sharing
practices and teaching users how to understand its new privacy controls.
The next day, Facebook announced that a "bug" that had inappropriately
shared users' private data — this time, their photos.

"Up to 6.8 million users
may have been affected, Facebook says. The "bug" affects users who gave
permission to a third-party app to access their Facebook photos. Normally,
that would only include photos that someone actually posted to their timeline.
But between Sept. 13 and Sept. 25, other photos were available, as well:
Photos that a user posted to Marketplace, Facebook's platform for selling
or buying goods. Photos posted to Stories, the platform for sharing images
that disappear after 24 hours."

CBS News reports:

"Facebook gave some of
the tech industry's biggest companies greater access to users' personal
data than the social-networking company previously disclosed, The New York
Times reported Tuesday. Special arrangements detailed in internal Facebook
documents gave Microsoft's Bing search engine access to the names of all
Facebook users' friends without consent and allowed Netflix and Spotify
to read Facebook users' private messages, the Times reported. Other arrangements
allowed Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their
friends and permitted Yahoo to view streams of friends' posts as recently
as this summer, the Times reported, despite Facebook's statements that
it had ended that type of data sharing. Facebook has been under scrutiny
since the revelation in March that consultancy Cambridge Analytica had
misused Facebook user data in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. Since then, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has testified in front
of Congress and the European Parliament to answer questions about Facebook's
handling of user data."

Never ends:

"The company has also
been in the hot seat for not doing enough to prevent abuse from Russian
trolls that posted misinformation and divisive content on the platform.
The Russian activity was part of a coordinated campaign to interfere with
the U.S. presidential election by sowing discord among voters. Facebook
acknowledged in July it entered into data-sharing agreements with dozens
of tech companies, admitting it continued sharing information with 61 hardware
and software makers even after it said it had discontinued the practice
in May 2015. The data-sharing agreements were intended to integrate the
"Facebook experience" with mobile devices, something a Facebook representative
at the time called a "standard industry practice." The Times reported Tuesday
that the records show Facebook had arrangements with more than 150 companies
-- mostly in the tech industry but also in the automotive and media industries
-- to provide access to the data of hundreds of millions of people each
month. The deals were all active in 2017, and some were still in effect
this year, the Times reported."

Report goes on and on.
They're f--king users. Wake up.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-14-18

Privacy at Facebook?
NPR reports:

"Facebook's leaders gave
certain big tech companies access to users' data — and the company refused
such access to competitors, including the video app Vine, which it targeted
right after it was launched by Twitter. These are two revelations about
Facebook's business practices found in more than 200 pages of the social
media giant's internal emails and documents from 2012 to 2015 that were
released by British lawmakers on Wednesday. The revelations add to the
mounting scrutiny of Facebook and its handling of user privacy. Earlier
this year, the social media giant revealed that 87 million of its users
had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics
firm that had worked with the Trump campaign. Facebook has long said it
does not sell user data — and it reiterated that claim Wednesday, saying
the newly released documents should not be taken out of context."

Many questions still not
answered:

"As he released the records,
Member of Parliament Damian Collins said, "We don't feel we have had straight
answers from Facebook" to important questions. Chief among them, he said,
are Facebook's "linking data to revenue" and whether it used data as a
tool — both to punish competitors and to reward advertisers.Collins highlighted
an email exchange from January 2013, when Facebook's Justin Osofsky noted
that Twitter had just launched Vine, a short-video platform that allowed
users to find Facebook friends on the app. "Unless anyone raises objections,
we will shut down their friends API access today," he wrote, adding, "We've
prepared reactive PR." "Yup, go for it," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied,
according to Collins. In contrast, Collins said, a dozen of the documents
from 2014 and 2015 refer to Facebook "whitelisting" companies — giving
them full access to users' friends lists. Other documents discuss setting
an advertising threshold for companies that want to "maintain access to
the data."

No problems with that?
None at all? Report goes on and on. Still no concerns?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-14-18

Think privacy is of concern
to the outrageously clueless bastards at Equifax? CBS News reports:

"A scathing new report
finds one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history was "entirely preventable."
A 14-month congressional investigation slammed credit rating agency Equifax
for lacking preventative measures in a data breach that exposed the personal
information of 148 million Americans last year. According to the House
report, hackers gained access to the Equifax network in May of last year
and attacked the company for 76 days. Thieves stole sensitive information,
including social security numbers, from nearly half of U.S. adults and
some lawmakers want Equifax to pay."

Not good enough.
Nowhere near.

"Republican Congressman
Will Hurd serves on the House Oversight Committee, which conducted the
investigation. "This breach could have been prevented if Equifax would
have followed some very basic things when it comes to good digital system
hygiene," Hurd said. The 96-page report says Equifax failed to modernize
its technology, failed to patch its systems when vulnerabilities were detected
and stored sensitive data on out-of-date and sub-par systems.

"The committee made several
recommendations to prevent future incidents like the one at Equifax, including
reducing the use of social security numbers as personal identifiers. To
protect yourself freeze your credit, have secure passwords and be sure
to shred sensitive documents.

"Equifax's full statement
to CBS News:

"We are deeply disappointed
that the Committee chose not to provide us with adequate time to review
and respond to a 100-page report consisting of highly technical and important
information. During the few hours we were given to conduct a preliminary
review we identified significant inaccuracies and disagree with many of
the factual findings. Equifax has worked in good faith for nearly 15 months
with the Committee to be transparent, cooperative and shed light on our
learnings from the incident in order to enrich the cybersecurity community.
While we believe that factual errors serve to undermine the content of
the report, we are generally supportive of many of the recommendations
the Committee laid out for the government and private industry to better
protect consumers, and have already made significant strides in many of
these areas. Since the incident, Equifax has moved forward, taking meaningful
steps to enhance our technology and security programs and will continue
to focus on consumers, customers and regaining trust with all stakeholders."

All three credit agencies
need to be abolished. Only way this problem can and will be solved.
These three agencies f--k over people seeking credit, employment, housing,
etc.. Remain an exigent threat to life, liberty, all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties. Forget? Lenders, employers, and landlords
managed to provide credit, employment, and housing decades ago before
these three bastard agencies took over the industry. Time for change.
... Hear the rumble? An unwanted dreaded second American revolution
catastrophically looming.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

"The Google+ social network
inadvertently gave app developers access to information on some 52.5 million
users — even data that users designated as private — because of a "bug"
in its software, Google says. The company had already announced it was
pulling the plug on the social network because of an earlier incident,
and now says the shutdown will happen four months sooner. Users' name,
birth date, email address, work history and other information were exposed
for nearly a week in November, Google says in a blog post about the privacy
flaw. Google announced in October that it was closing the consumer version
of Google+ because of a vulnerability that left nearly 500,000 accounts
exposed reportedly from 2015 to March 2018, as well as the fact that it
had failed to catch on. There was no evidence that data was misused in
either incident, Google says."

How could it possibly
know that?

"No third party compromised
our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently
had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way,"
Google says about the November problem."

Believe it?

"The company adds that
the November vulnerability did not expose passwords, financial information,
ID numbers and other data often used for identity theft."

Should users consider
themselves 'lucky?'

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-7-18

Think privacy is not under
ferocious attack? CBS News reports:

"Some Delta Air Lines
passengers will soon go through airport check-in and security just by showing
their faces. The nation's first biometric airport terminal launches Saturday
in Atlanta. The system will allow passengers to go from curb to gate and
onto the plane without showing their passports.

"The technology is about
saving time but it's not without some controversy. Republican Sen. Mike
Lee and Democrat Ed Markey have called on Customs and Border Protection
to stop expanding the biometric program, partially mandated by Congress,
until the agency implements privacy regulations and provides a report to
Congress on the viability of biometrics. "It's a massive threat and I don't
say that lightly. What the program is doing is making it commonplace to
use your face as a digital ID," said Jeramie Scott, an attorney at the
Electronic Privacy Information Center. John Wagner, deputy executive assistant
commissioner at CBP, is the architect of the system. He said U.S. citizens
can opt out of having the airline collect their photograph and transmit
to CBP. He also said they see a 98 to 99 percent match rate."

How soon before it becomes
mandatory? Forget? We already live in a de facto fascist police-state
since 9/11, quickly transitioning to the Trump nazi's Fourth Reich.
... Hear the rumble?

Aggressive stupidity reigns:

"As Flight 185 to Shanghai
boarded we watched most passengers opt to use the facial recognition system
to board. Passenger Alicia Graham said she's not worried about it. "This
is the world we live in…TSA already has it so what's the difference?" Graham
said."

You're a clueless idiot,
ma'am. Head securely lodged where the sun seldom shines. Morons
like you, lady, enable these nazi f--kers to continue to eviscerate all
civil and constitutional rights and liberties. You're proof positive
of the old adage, 'can fix ignorant, can't fix stupid.'

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-7-18

Incompetence. Egregious
invasion of privacy. To say nothing of the hassle, cost, and ongoing
waste of time for victims. NPR reports:

"In one of the largest
cybersecurity breaches in history, Marriott International said Friday that
information on up to about 500 million of its customers worldwide was exposed
in a breach of its Starwood guest reservation database dating as far back
as 2014. The world's largest hotel chain said it learned of the breach
on Sept. 8."

Where the hell have they
been all these years? Out to lunch?

"For 327 million of the
affected guests, the compromised data includes "some combination of name,
mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood
Preferred Guest ("SPG") account information, date of birth, gender, arrival
and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences,"
the company said. For some customers, the information "also includes payment
card numbers and payment card expiration dates, but the payment card numbers
were encrypted," Marriott added. But the company said it could not rule
out the possibility that the hackers were able to decrypt those details.
Marriott
said it reported the data breach to law enforcement officials and has begun
to notify "regulatory authorities." The attorneys general of New York,
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts said they've opened investigations into
the breach.

"We’ve
opened an investigation into the Marriott data breach. New Yorkers deserve
to know that their personal information will be protected. —
NY AG Underwood (@NewYorkStateAG) November 30, 2018"

Clearly, not possible.
This crap occurs over and over and over again. If guests are willing
to pay cash, put down a cash security deposit, why the hell is that not
sufficient? Why do they need all this goddamned personal information
they clearly cannot protect?

"Arne Sorenson, Marriott's
president and chief executive officer, said: "We deeply regret this incident
happened. We fell short of what our guests deserve and what we expect of
ourselves. We are doing everything we can to support our guests, and using
lessons learned to be better moving forward."

"The data breach is one
of the largest in history. It's not as massive as the 2013 hack of Yahoo,
which hit 3 billion users, and exposed data including names, email addresses,
phone numbers, birthdates and passwords. But the Marriott breach includes
sensitive data such as passport numbers, mailing addresses and credit card
information. Equifax said about 148 million people were impacted by a massive
cybersecurity breach of the credit-reporting agency last year. That data
included names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses and, in
some cases, driver's license numbers and credit card information."

Delusionally believe this
is not a massive, continuing issue? Wake up.

"The Marriott hack is
"one of the most significant data breaches in history given the size ...
and the sensitivity of the personal information that was stolen," Ted Rossman,
an analyst with CreditCards.com, said in an email. Given the sensitive
personal information involved, he said, people "should be concerned that
criminals could use this info to open fraudulent accounts in their names."
Rossman recommends that affected people freeze their credit by contacting
credit agencies Experian, Equifax and TransUnion."

Until you finally, courageously
stand up to the corporate management suite, this shit will not end.
Think these clueless bastards truly give a shit? Consider it a cost
of doing business. As they laugh their corpulent asses off all the
way to the bank. You're being shamelessly f--ked. Too stupid
to understand?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-7-18

Another egregious attack
on privacy by the de facto fascist police-state we now live in, quickly
transitioning to the Trump nazi's Fourth Reich. NBC News reports:

"The U.S. Secret Service
on Nov. 19 started testing a facial recognition system that uses security
cameras to capture images of people outside the White House and then tries
to match them to “people of interest.” The move has heightened concerns
of the government using high-tech tools to expand its monitoring of the
public. In this case, the “people of interest” at least for now are Secret
Service workers who have volunteered to take part in the test. But the
security cameras take video of people on the sidewalk and street, and there
is no way for them to avoid having the system run their faces against the
facial recognition program. Those who don’t want that to happen “may choose
to avoid the area,” the Secret Service said in a document published last
week."

Aryan arrogant jackbooted
bastards.

"All images captured during
the pilot will be limited to the White House security system and will be
deleted once the test ends next August, the Secret Service said."

Think so?

"The test seems to be
limited enough to avoid immediate privacy concerns, but it “crosses an
important line by opening the door to the mass, suspicionless scrutiny
of Americans on public sidewalks,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst
for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a blog post published
Tuesday."

Here's the problem:

"Most adult Americans
are already in a facial recognition database of some kind, the result of
governments formatting driver’s license and passport photos for such use,
according to the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University
Law Center."

Precisely who gave them
the authority? The individuals responsible over all the years?

"Real-time facial recognition
systems are also being designed for use by local police departments. Amazon,
for example, is testing its facial recognition product, called Rekognition,
with the police in Orlando, Florida. The Orlando pilot is similar to the
White House pilot in that it appears to be limited to volunteer officers.
Ultimately, the Secret Service wants to identify "people of interest" outside
the White House more quickly than the current system, which relies on static
images from surveillance cameras that agents and officers compare against
lists. The lists contain images of "people of interest" who may pose a
threat based on their contact with law enforcement officers, social media
posts, tips from the public and media reports, the agency says."

"The Secret Service has
not said what company it hired to provide the facial recognition system
or where exactly the cameras are placed. The agency declined to comment
on Tuesday."

Goddamned f--king nazi
storm troopers. No foreign power, no terrorist organization, not
even the criminal element presents a greater threat to life, liberty, all
civil and constitutional rights and liberties than all levels and branches
of government, -- including law enforcement. ... Right, Sheriff?

"There are few regulations
at any level of government outlining how law enforcement can use facial
recognition, leaving it to individual agencies to decide what’s best."

Lawmakers across our formerly
great country serve only their corporate masters and law enforcement.
Certainly, not the people who elected them to office. ... Right,
Sheriff?

"That worries privacy
and civil-rights advocates, who say there is little keeping the government
from targeting particular groups, such as immigrants or participants in
political protests. They also point out that facial recognition is run
by algorithms that have been shown to misidentify people of certain races
-- black women in particular."

"Several Google employees
have gone public with their opposition to the tech giant's plans for building
a search engine tailored to China's censorship demands. The project, code-named
Dragonfly, would block certain websites and search terms determined by
the Chinese government — a move that, according to a growing number of
workers at Google, is tantamount to enabling "state surveillance." "We
are among thousands of employees who have raised our voices for months.
International human rights organizations and investigative reporters have
also sounded the alarm, emphasizing serious human rights concerns and repeatedly
calling on Google to cancel the project," said the letter's signatories,
whose group initially numbered nine employees but has ballooned since its
publication on Medium.

"News of the program first
surfaced in the website The Intercept, which reported in August that the
customized search engine would "blacklist websites and search terms about
human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest." As NPR's Jasmine
Garsd explained, those terms would likely include such words as "repression,"
"Nobel Prize" and "Tiananmen Square," the Beijing landmark where Chinese
authorities brutally subdued mass protests nearly three decades ago. "And
this is really important," she told NPR's Morning Edition: "The search
platform would also reportedly make Chinese users' search records accessible
to the government."

Raises the question
is Google turning over search records in the United States to government
goons without a warrant?

"Other news outlets, such
as The New York Times, backed up the Intercept's reporting, noting Google's
desire to tap the huge Chinese market — though adding that work on the
project does not necessarily mean its release is imminent. Google once
ran a similarly censored version of its search engine in China, but it
officially pulled out of the country in 2010 after friction with Beijing
and significant backlash in the U.S. The employees are not alone in expressing
their dismay at reports of the new project's development. In fact, they
released their letter the same day that Amnesty International launched
a protest of its own. The human rights organization announced it would
be reaching out to Google staff to add their names to a petition calling
on CEO Sundar Pichai to kill the project before it can even get off the
ground."

Snowball's chance that
will happen. Forget? Profit comes first to the corporate management
suite.

"This is a watershed moment
for Google," Joe Westby, Amnesty's researcher on technology and human rights,
said in a statement Tuesday. "As the world's number one search engine,
it should be fighting for an internet where information is freely accessible
to everyone, not backing the Chinese government's dystopian alternative."

Use Google? You're
a fool. While there is no question its search engine is indeed powerful,
they
track. Sell and share user information. DuckDuckGo
and Startpage do not. Both are excellent, particularly, DuckDuckGo.
There are alternatives to Google. Wake up.

"This is also not the
first time Google's leadership has gotten pushback from within its own
ranks over company policies. The tech giant decided not to renew a contract
with the Pentagon after employees revolted over a controversial project
involving artificial intelligence for drone footage analysis. "Many of
us accepted employment at Google with the company's values in mind, including
its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and an understanding
that Google was a company willing to place its values above its profits,"
the employees said in their letter Tuesday. "After a year of disappointments
including Project Maven, Dragonfly, and Google's support for abusers, we
no longer believe this is the case," they wrote. "This is why we're taking
a stand."

Wake up.
Time for the public to hold these bastards accountable. Not just
cave in.

The Washington Post
reports:

"More than 90 Google employees
have joined a petition protesting the company’s plans to build a search
engine that complies with China’s online censorship regime. An employee-led
backlash against the project has been churning for months at the company,
but Tuesday’s petition marks the first time workers at Google have used
their names in a public document objecting to the plans.

“Our opposition to Dragonfly
is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in
oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be,” stated the petition,
published on Medium. “The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in its
readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and to use surveillance to repress
dissent. Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a
volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to
deny other countries similar concessions.”

Need to be equally concerned
about what Google is doing with personal information of users right here
in the United States.

"Amnesty International,
which launched a “day of action” Tuesday protesting Dragonfly, has pushed
Pichai to drop the program and issued an open call for people to sign a
petition. “This is a watershed moment for Google,” Joe Westby, Amnesty
International’s researcher on technology and human rights, said in a news
release. “As the world’s number one search engine, it should be fighting
for an Internet where information is freely accessible to everyone, not
backing the Chinese government’s dystopian alternative.”

Again, need to be equally
concerned about what Google is doing with the data of American users.

"Earlier this year, more
than 1,400 Google employees signed an internal letter demanding more transparency
and accountability on the ethics of company projects, citing Dragonfly
as an initiative that was developed without employee input. “Currently
we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions
about our work, our projects, and our employment,” the letter read. Pichai
has said that Google’s China-compliant search engine is not a done deal.
“I take a long-term view of this,” he said during an event hosted by Wired
in October. “And I think it’s important for us — given how important the
market is, and how many users there are — we feel obliged to think hard
about this problem and take a long-term view.”

Called bullshit.
Unadulterated. Forget? Pichai is far more concerned with profit
than privacy. To say nothing of top management's apparent willingness
to cooperate with dictators to line corporate coffers.

"If Google moves forward
with Dragonfly, it could allow the company to reenter China’s online search
market after nearly a decade. But Google’s plans in China have drawn the
scrutiny of U.S. lawmakers who have accused the company of being evasive
about the prototype search engine. More broadly, the tech industry is facing
an intense backlash over its data privacy practices, with some members
of Congress proposing legislation that would place new restrictions on
how tech companies collect and use customer data."

Hopefully, when Democrats
retake the House in January something will come of this. Then again,
think Democrats aren't also lining their pockets off the corporate management
suite?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

11-2-18

Think the following isn't
a joke? NBC News reports:

"Microsoft announced on
Friday that the company was standing by its decision to bid for “JEDI,”
a U.S. government project aimed at redesigning the digital infrastructure
of the Department of Defense, despite pushback from company employees.
Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, explained the
company’s stance in a blog post. “First, we believe that the people who
defend our country need and deserve our support,” Smith stated. “And second,
to withdraw from this market is to reduce our opportunity to engage in
the public debate about how new technologies can best be used in a responsible
way. We are not going to withdraw from the future. In the most positive
way possible, we are going to work to help shape it.”

Question to be asked is
remarkably simple. How can the military trust Microsoft when their
civilian operating systems are grossly overpriced and buggy? Designed
to abrogate privacy?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

"Europe enacted a tough
law in May which requires, among other things, that companies make data
breaches public within 72 hours of discovering them."

Can't have that, can we?
Did the right thing. Time for the same thing to happen here in the
United States. Rein the bastards in. Do it now.

"That's why Facebook had
to promptly announce last month that its systems had been hacked and at
least 50 million user accounts were compromised."

Tough shit. When
will they finally spend the money necessary to reduce the incidence of
such bullshit? When?

"In June, California passed
legislation that — if it is enacted as written — would go even farther,
allowing users to sue for damages for exactly the kind of data breach Facebook
suffered."

About time. Stick
it to the bastards until they finally smarten up.

"They don't want to entertain
the possibility that they would [be]
liable to individuals for doing some sort of harm from all the data that
they collect," says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a digital advocacy group. Companies are weighing in
now because regulation is coming from all fronts and they're trying to
control it, he says."

Time to finally effectively
stick it to the bastards.

"Early this summer, a
who's who in tech attended a high-level, private meeting in San Francisco
organized by the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade association
for Silicon Valley companies. According to two people with knowledge of
the meeting, it was there that Facebook's top lobbyist, Joel Kaplan, warned
that an impending California privacy law posed a threat to everyone in
the room. If the California law spread to other states, Kaplan said, it
would present an even bigger problem than privacy provisions in Europe's
new General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR."

Doesn't your heart
bleed?

"Just this year, [you
have] a data broker law from Vermont, in addition to Europe and California,"
said the EFF's Falcon. "And then dating back even further, the state of
Illinois has a biometric law that Facebook has opposed and has been trying
to amend. So they are seeing a trend."

This remains so because
the bastards on the federal level couldn't care less. They're bought
and paid for, forget? Precisely, what the corporate management suite
desperately wants and needs:

"That may explain why,
soon after that San Francisco meeting, an industrywide effort emerged to
not just get behind federal privacy legislation, but to actually write
it."

Most convenient, isn't
it?

"While there's no formal
legislative language yet, the working drafts so far include two must-have
provisions for tech companies, according to two people familiar with the
process. The companies want a pre-emption clause to ensure federal law
trumps any state privacy laws. And they want to put the Federal Trade Commission
in charge of enforcing digital privacy laws."

So absolutely nothing
is done to rein in these corporate misfits.

"Pre-empting state laws
would allow the industry to avoid a patchwork of rules in different states.
And tech companies would also get to work with a watchdog they know.
Critics add that the FTC isn't particularly aggressive."

Added bonus, no?
LOL.

"The FTC doesn't have
authority to make [new] privacy rules right now," says Ariel Fox Johnson,
policy counsel for Common Sense Media, an advocacy group. "I don't know
what the FTC can do besides put out guides or try to go after people for
violating statements that they've made in their privacy policies."

Most convenient, isn't
it? You're being royally f--ked. Time to finally wake up.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-17-18

Google tracks your movements
no matter what. CBS News reports:

"Google wants to know
where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly
tell it not to. An Associated Press investigation found that many
Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data
even if you've used privacy settings that say they will prevent it from
doing so. Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these
findings at the AP's request.

"Storing your minute-by-minute
travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine
the location of suspects - such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North
Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene.
So the company will let you "pause" a setting called Location History.
Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've
been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location
History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no
longer stored." That isn't true. Even with Location History paused,
some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without
asking."

Report goes on and on,
but you get the message, don't you? ... You don't?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-17-18

Think the following, if
implemented by Walmart, won't be an egregious invasion of privacy?
CBS News reports:

"Like it or not, employers
have always been able to monitor workers. Company email isn't private,
and phone calls often come with a familiar voice saying, "This call may
be monitored or recorded for quality assurance." But today, the emergence
of new technologies that lets businesses track, listen to and even watch
employees while on company time is raising concern about "Big Brother"
levels of surveillance. Life on the job, privacy advocates fear,
is rapidly turning into life under a managerial microscope. Take
Walmart, which recently patented a system that could take employee monitoring
to a new level by letting the retail giant listen in on workers and customers.
The patent filing, for a system Walmart calls "Listening to the Frontend,"
calls for the use of "sound sensors" to zero in on customers' shopping
and check-out experience. It would also monitor specific noises, like the
beeps of item scanners and rustling of bags, and even the conversations
of workers and shoppers."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-10-18

... A word to the wise.
NPR reports:

"Taking a genetic test
in your 20s or 30s could, indeed, affect your ability to get long-term-care
insurance later — or at least the price you'll pay. And people who are
considering enrolling in Medicare after age 65 would do well to read the
fine print of the sign-up rules.

"In general, long-term-care
insurers can indeed use genetic test results when they decide whether to
offer you coverage. The federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act
does prohibit insurers from asking for or using your genetic information
to make decisions about whether to sell you health insurance or how much
to charge you. But those privacy protections don't apply to long-term-care
policies, life insurance or disability insurance.

"If the insurer asks you
whether you've undergone genetic testing, you generally must disclose it,
even if the testing was performed through a direct-to-consumer site like
23andMe, says Catherine Theroux, a spokeswoman for LIMRA, an insurance
industry trade group. "You need to release any medically relevant
information," she says."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-3-18

Highly reminiscent
of our outrageously bought and paid for judiciary, Llano County prosecutors,
Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards in black
who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge, do as they
please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider the following.
It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything our formerly
great country once stood for. No longer.

"Facial recognition software
sold by Amazon mistakenly identified 28 members of Congress as people who
had been arrested for crimes, the American Civil Liberties Union announced
on Thursday. Amazon Rekognition has been marketed as tool that provides
extremely accurate facial analysis through photos and video."

Bullshit. Simply,
not true.

"The ACLU tested that
assertion by using the software to scan photos of every current member
of the House and Senate in a database that the watchdog built from thousands
of publicly available arrest photos. "The members of Congress who
were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include
Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages,
from all across the country," the ACLU stated. The test misidentified
people of color at a high rate — 39 percent — even though they made up
only 20 percent of Congress. One member falsely cited as a crime suspect
was Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who first came to prominence as a civil rights
leader."

Amazon lines its pockets.
The public is f--ked over by law enforcement. Any questions?

"As part of the test,
the ACLU said it used Amazon's default match settings. But a spokeswoman
for Amazon Web Services said in an emailed statement that the ACLU should
have changed those settings — and used a higher "threshold," or percentage
that measures how confident Rekognition is in finding a match. "While
80% confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs,
animals, or other social media use cases, it wouldn't be appropriate for
identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty," she said.
For law enforcement, Amazon "guides customers" to set the threshold at
95 percent or higher."

Disingenuous corporate
bullshit. Here's why:

"ACLU of Northern California
attorney Jacob Snow responded to that comment in an emailed statement:
"We know from our test that Amazon makes no effort to ask users what they
are using Rekognition for," he said."

Tell you anything?

"Snow doesn't think that
changing the threshold changes the danger: "Face surveillance technology
in the hands of government is primed for abuse and raises grave civil rights
concerns."

Intentionally, so.
It's how the criminal jackbooted bastards in law enforcement get their
cookies off abusing power. How this corporation lines its pockets.

"Outcry from privacy and
civil rights groups has not stopped law enforcement from pursuing the technology.
The Orlando, Fla., police force tested Rekognition's real-time surveillance.
The Washington County Sheriff's Office, near Portland, Ore., has used it
to search faces from photos of suspects taken by deputies."

Jackbooted nazi motherf--kers.
Law enforcement presents an exigent threat to life, liberty, all civil
and constitutional rights and liberties. We've lived in a de facto
fascist police-state for decades, quickly transitioning to the Trump nazi's
Fourth
Reich. No longer a democratic republic. In name only.

"This is partly a result
of vendors pushing facial recognition technology because it becomes another
avenue of revenue," Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic
Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., told NPR. He compared facial
recognition software to body cameras worn by law enforcement, which can
be used for police accountability or, increasingly, public surveillance."

Raw, jackbooted nazism.

"He stressed the need
for debate so that the technology doesn't become a poor solution for bad
policy. "Because of the disproportionate error rate, and because of the
real risk of depriving civil liberties posed by facial recognition technology,
we need to have a conversation about how and when and under what circumstances
this technology should be used by law enforcement, if at all."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-3-18

Highly reminiscent
of our outrageously bought and paid for judiciary, Llano County prosecutors,
Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards in black
who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge, do as they
please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider the following.
It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything our formerly
great country once stood for. No longer.

Resistance grows.
CBS News reports:

"Philadelphia will stop
giving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a real-time arrest
database, accusing the agency of misusing the information to target people
who are in the country illegally but are otherwise not accused of any crimes,
Mayor Jim Kenney said on Friday. His decision means the city will not renew
a contract that expires August 31. "Such practices sow fear and distrust
in Philadelphia's great immigrant community, and make it more difficult
for our Police Department to solve crimes. I cannot in good conscience
allow the agreement to continue," Kenney said, according to CBS Philadelphia."

Excellent. Stand
on principle.

"As a "sanctuary city,"
Philadelphia had already limited cooperation with immigration enforcement.
It won't release inmates to ICE without a judicial warrant. The Trump
administration wants to cut funding to the city as a result but has so
far been blocked by a judge. "How anyone can define this as making
America great again is beyond me," Kenney said."

Here's the problem:

"Anyone who interacts
with law enforcement is entered into the database, including those who
are arrested, victims and witnesses, with limits on what ICE officers can
view. Kenney said the city's conversations in recent weeks with ICE only
confirmed what he had feared. With access to the database, Kenney
said ICE has been arresting otherwise law-abiding residents for immigration
violations. He said it has also been targeting foreign-born residents for
investigation even though there is no information on their immigration
status."

Raw nazism.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-3-18

Highly reminiscent
of our outrageously bought and paid for judiciary, Llano County prosecutors,
Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards in black
who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge, do as they
please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider the following.
It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything our formerly
great country once stood for. No longer.

Think we don't live in
a surveillance state? Haven't for years? The Washington
Post reports:

"Federal air marshals
have for years been quietly monitoring small numbers of U.S. air passengers
and reporting on in-flight behavior considered suspicious, even if those
individuals have no known terrorism links, the Transportation Security
Administration said on Sunday."

"Under a sensitive, previously
undisclosed program called “Quiet Skies,” the TSA has since 2010 tasked
marshals to identify passengers who raise flags because of travel histories
or other factors and conduct secret observations of their actions — including
behavior as common as sweating heavily or using the restroom repeatedly
— as they fly between U.S. destinations."

Nazism. Surveillance
state. Perspiration and bathroom use are not probable cause a crime
has, or is, about to occur.

"The Boston Globe first
revealed the existence of the Quiet Skies program on Sunday. In response
to questions, TSA spokesman James O. Gregory offered more details of the
program’s origins and goals, comparing it to other law enforcement activities
that ask officers to closely monitor individuals or areas vulnerable to
crime."

“We are no different than
the cop on the corner who is placed there because there is an increased
possibility that something might happen,” Gregory said. “When you’re in
a tube at 30,000 feet ... it makes sense to put someone there.”

Goes much further than
that. The neighborhood cop is not charged with creating dossiers
as is the air marshal. The stated function of the air marshal originally
was to provide security, not create dossiers, invade personal privacy.

"The TSA declined to provide
complete information on how individuals are selected for Quiet Skies and
how the program works."

They're covering their
ass. The lack of transparency has nothing to do with security, everything
to do with concealing the fact they're deliberately abrogating the privacy
of passengers. Abusing power.

"According to the TSA,
the program uses travel records and other information to identify passengers
who will be subject to additional checks at airports and observed in flight
by air marshals who report on their activities to the agency."

Why would anyone fly?
Put up with this bullshit? Enable this abuse of authority by the
criminal jackbooted bastards in blue.

"The initiative raises
new questions about the privacy of ordinary Americans as they go about
routine travel within the United States and about the broad net cast by
law enforcement as it seeks to keep air travel safe."

Nothing to do with safety,
everything to do with getting their cookies off abusing power. ...
Right,
Sheriff?

"Gregory said the program
did not single out passengers based on race or religion and should not
be considered surveillance because the agency does not, for example, listen
to passengers’ calls or follow flagged individuals around outside airports."

If it looks like a duck,
walks like a duck, quacks likes a duck, guess what? It's a f--king
duck. ... Right, Sheriff?

"But during in-flight
observation of people who are tagged as Quiet Skies passengers, marshals
use an agency checklist to record passenger behavior: Did he or she sleep
during the flight? Did he or she use a cellphone? Look around erratically?"

“The program analyzes
information on a passenger’s travel patterns while taking the whole picture
into account,” Gregory said, adding “an additional line of defense to aviation
security.”

Horse shit. What
it is remains a fascist police-state where the criminal jackbooted bastards
in blue get their cookies off abusing power.

“If that person does all
that stuff, and the airplane lands safely and they move on, the behavior
will be noted, but they will not be approached or apprehended,” Gregory
said. He declined to say whether the program has resulted in arrests
or disruption of any criminal plots."

Why the lack of transparency?
If it's so successful, why not hail its benefits with proof, not bullshit
hearsay. If nothing happened during the flight, why isn't all information
destroyed after landing? Why are the jackbooted bastards creating
dossiers on innocent passengers?

"Hugh Handeyside, senior
staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security
Project, called on the TSA to provide more information about the program
to passengers. “Such surveillance not only makes no sense, it is
a big waste of taxpayer money and raises a number of constitutional questions,”
he said. “These concerns and the need for transparency are all the more
acute because of TSA’s track record of using unreliable and unscientific
techniques to screen and monitor travelers who have done nothing wrong.”

Need to be repeatedly
sued.

"The TSA, which was created
soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, screens on average more
than 2 million passengers a day. While the agency is tasked with
a weighty public safety mission, it has at times been publicly rebuked
for being intrusive and abusive at airport checkpoints. It has been accused
of doing little to enhance security while subjecting passengers to searches
or questioning."

Precisely, why many of
us will no longer fly. Refuse to put up with this horse shit.

Think Homeland Security
is competent? Wake up. Get this:

"In 2015, the Department
of Homeland Security’s inspector general found that undercover agents were
able to slip fake bombs past TSA screeners about 95 percent of the time.
A year later, the flying public was in an uproar over long lines to move
through security screening."

The public has itself
to blame. Why fly if they insist on f--king you in the ass without
the Vaseline? To get their cookies off.

"The agency has also been
criticized for its treatment of Muslims and other minorities who have complained
of being profiled while traveling. Earlier this year, media reports
revealed that the agency had compiled a secret list of unruly passengers.
Passengers may be selected for Quiet Skies screening because of their affiliation
with someone on the government’s no-fly list or other databases aimed at
preventing terrorist attacks."

Inaccurate databases.

“This program raises a
whole host of civil liberties and profiling concerns,” said Faiza Patel,
co-director of the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for
Justice. Critics say that government watch lists and databases are
overly broad and include incorrect information. The no-fly list grew
from about 16 people in September 2001 to 64,000 in 2014. But Patel,
an attorney, said law enforcement officials are generally free to surveil
individuals as long as they do not do so based on criteria such as ethnicity."

"A Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) domestic surveillance program is drawing criticism
for tracking information from U.S. citizens not suspected of any crimes.
The
program has drawn criticism within the agency, according to CBS News sources."

Good to see not all employees
of this out of control nazi agency are goons. Encouraging, isn't
it?

"Officials familiar with
the program said "Quiet Skies" complies with security constraints and privacy
requirements. One source said the "Quiet Skies" team has to be prepared
to justify why an individual is being questioned if they are challenged."

Think so? Believe
it?

"If a flyer is on the
list for a certain amount of time and travels without incident, they are
automatically removed from the list. Some in the security field believe
this creates a certain level of risk because if the person being surveilled
is a sleeper agent, they may succeed in flying under the radar. But congressional
concerns about redress prompted the policy. The "Quiet Skies" program
has been in existence since 2010 and the TSA says Congress and the airlines
have been briefed on the program over the last 12 to 18 months."

Trust them? Think
they're not abusing authority?

"At least one Air Marshal
has filed a complaint the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General's
Office about the program, believing it is a waste of time, money and manpower."

Tell you anything?
Anything at all?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

8-3-18

Highly reminiscent
of our outrageously bought and paid for judiciary, Llano County prosecutors,
Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards in black
who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge, do as they
please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider the following.
It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything our formerly
great country once stood for. No longer.

Police are tracking.
NBC reports:

"Picture a crowded street.
Police are searching for a man believed to have committed a violent crime.
To find him, they feed a photograph into a video surveillance network powered
by artificial intelligence. A camera, one of thousands, scans the
street, instantly analyzing the faces of everyone it sees. Then, an alert:
The algorithms found a match with someone in the crowd. Officers rush to
the scene and take him into custody. But it turns out the guy isn’t
the one they’re looking for -- he just looked a lot like him. The machines
were wrong. This is what some makers of this technology fear might
happen if police adopt advanced forms of facial recognition that make it
easier to track wanted criminals, missing people and suspected terrorists
-- while expanding the government’s ability to secretly monitor the public."

Already happening.

"Despite “real-time” facial
recognition’s dazzling potential for crime-prevention, it is also raising
alarms of the risks of mistakes and abuse. Those concerns are not only
coming from privacy and civil rights advocates, but increasingly from tech
firms themselves. In recent months, one tech executive has vowed
never to sell his facial recognition products to police departments, and
another has called on Congress to intervene. One company has formed an
ethics board for guidance, and another says it might do the same. Employees
and shareholders from some of the world’s biggest tech firms have pressed
their leaders to get out of business with law enforcement."

1984 on steroids.
Nazi
America.

“Time is winding down
but it’s not too late for someone to take a stand and keep this from happening,”
said Brian Brackeen, the CEO of the facial recognition firm Kairos, who
wants tech firms to join him in keeping the technology out of law enforcement’s
hands. Brackeen, who is black, said he has long been troubled by
facial recognition algorithms’ struggle to distinguish faces of people
with dark skin, and the implications of its use by the government and police.
If they do get it, he recently wrote, “there’s simply no way that face
recognition software will be not used to harm citizens.”

Already happening.
Far worse to come.

"With few scientific standards
or government regulations, there is little preventing police departments
from using facial recognition to target immigrants or identify participants
in a political protest, critics say."

No matter the scientific
standards and/or government regulations, this technology will always
be abused by tyrants. Always.

“There needs to be greater
transparency around the use of these technologies,” said Rashida Richardson,
director of policy research at the AI Now Institute at New York University.
“And a more open, public conversation about what types of use cases we
are comfortable with — and what types of use cases should just not be available.”

Not good enough.
Nowhere near. Wake up. The Founders created a template for
a democratic republic that is as close to perfection as it could be.
Yet, tyrants have managed to bastardize the United States Constitution
to the point where liberty no longer exists in our formerly great country.
-- You have the freedom to do what you're told. Wake up.

"As the technology advances,
“real-time” facial recognition — which involves the constant scanning of
live video feeds to match moving faces with a database of still images
— is starting to spread. Police in China are reportedly using it to pick
suspects out of crowds, and retailers there are using it to identify customers
and their buying preferences. U.S. security agencies are testing the technology
in some airports and border crossings. And now systems are being designed
for use by local police.

“This is a technology
that is progressing so rapidly and is coming down in cost so rapidly that
in the future we should expect it to be efficient, cheap and common,” said
Gregory C. Allen, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security,
a Washington-based think tank."

-- The frog lulled to
sleep in a pot of water gently heating on a stove top. Wake up.

“We are at a moment where
facial recognition is being marketed to communities while not being proven
as public safety tools,” said Matt Cagle, an attorney for the American
Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which uncovered efforts by
Amazon to market its facial recognition technology to police departments,and
then tested it, finding that it mistakenly matched faces of 28 members
of Congress with police mugshots.“We think it’s harmful because it’s unproven
and it’s been deployed in some places without any rules.”

This presents an exigent
threat to life, liberty, all civil and constitutional rights and liberties.
No foreign power, no terrorist organization, not even the criminal element
presents a greater threat to liberty and life itself than all levels and
branches of this out of control, corrupt and abusive government.
... Right, Sheriff?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

7-27-18

Think Putin's the only
problem? Get this. NBC reports:

"Iranian hackers have
laid the groundwork to carry out extensive cyberattacks on U.S. and European
infrastructure and on private companies, and the U.S. is warning allies,
hardening its defenses and weighing a counterattack, say multiple senior
U.S. officials. Despite Iran having positioned cyber weapons to carry
out attacks, there is no suggestion an offensive operation is imminent,
according to the officials, who requested anonymity in order to speak.
Cyber threats have been a major theme of the 2018 Aspen Security Forum,
with administration officials from Director of National Intelligence Dan
Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
all warning of the pervasive danger from Russia, China, Iran, and North
Korea. In Aspen Thursday, Coats said that Russia was a more active
cyber foe than Iran or China — "by far" the most aggressive, he said.
While Russia may be the most aggressive, the U.S. officials said Iran is
making preparations that would enable denial-of-service attacks against
thousands of electric grids, water plants, and health care and technology
companies in the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and other countries in Europe
and the Middle East."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

7-20-18

The following is appalling.
True threat to privacy. NPR reports:

"To an outsider, the fancy
booths at a June health insurance industry gathering in San Diego, Calif.,
aren't very compelling: a handful of companies pitching "lifestyle" data
and salespeople touting jargony phrases like "social determinants of health."
But dig deeper and the implications of what they're selling might give
many patients pause: a future in which everything you do — the things you
buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV — may help determine
how much you pay for health insurance. With little public scrutiny,
the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum
up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including,
odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking
your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They're
collecting what you post on social media, whether you're behind on your
bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated
computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health
care could cost them."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

7-13-18

Highly reminiscent
of our outrageously bought and paid for judiciary, Llano County prosecutors,
Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards in black
who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge, do as they
please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider the following.
It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything our formerly
great country once stood for. No longer.

"A group of Amazon shareholders
are calling on the company to stop pitching its facial recognition tool
to local law enforcement agencies, writing in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos
that the technology could pose a privacy threat and a financial risk."

No question. Clearly,
on both counts.

"The letter comes amid
mounting criticism of the tool, called Rekognition, from privacy activists
and civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties
Union. The groups have raised concerns that the tool could be used to build
a system to automate the widespread identification and tracking of anyone."

"While Rekognition may
be intended to enhance some law enforcement activities, we are deeply concerned
it may ultimately violate civil and human rights," the shareholders said
in the letter to Bezos, a copy of which was provided to NBC News by the
ACLU."

Can and will. Already
has. Presents an exigent threat to liberty.

"The shareholders who
co-signed the letter also said they were concerned that facial recognition
technology "would be used to unfairly and disproportionately target and
surveil people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations."

So, what else is new?

"The letter is signed
by 19 Amazon shareholders, though they do not represent enough voting power
in the company to force a change. Bezos, now recognized by Forbes as the
richest living person, remains the largest individual shareholder in the
company."

Imagine the power of this
corporation. All data it collects on those of you who do business
with it. Delusionally believe it doesn't sell and/or share that data?

"But in a written statement
to the Associated Press last month, the company said it requires all of
its customers to comply with the law and to be responsible in the use of
its products."

Like entrusting a thief
with your most valuable assets and expecting him not to steal them.

"The statement said some
law enforcement agencies have used the tool to find abducted people, for
example."

There is no way to ensure
the use of this product will be reserved only for such purposes and not
abused by the goddamned criminal jackbooted bastards in blue, right,
Sheriff?

"In their letter to Bezos,
the shareholders pointed to the recent "scrutiny" of Facebook over its
data privacy policies. The social media company has been embroiled in controversy
ever since the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm linked
to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, harvested user data from Facebook's
platform. "The recent experience and scrutiny of Facebook demonstrates
the degree to which these news issues may undermine company value as the
detrimental impacts on society become clear," the shareholders said.

Enlightened self-interest.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

7-6-18

About time. NBC
reports:

"California enacted the
nation’s strongest data privacy law on Thursday that could presage national
changes to how big tech companies, including Facebook, Google and Amazon,
collect and use personal data. The law, passed by the state legislature
on Tuesday and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, requires companies to disclose
the types of data they collect about consumers and with whom they share
that information. Companies will be forced to let consumers opt-out of
having their data sold. The law will also prohibit companies from charging
a consumer or treating them differently because they opted out of having
their data sold. Companies will also be required to secure customer
data or risk being fined by California’s attorney general, according to
the legislation. The Assembly just passed the most robust set of
Internet privacy protections in the nation. A constitutional right
to privacy is unique to California and has served as the basis for many
groundbreaking privacy laws enacted over the years. The protections
won’t take effect until 2020, meaning the fight between lawmakers, advocates
and tech companies to further shape the regulations, or water them down,
is still far from over."

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6-29-18

Major Supreme Court ruling
on privacy. NPR reports:

"In a major win for privacy
rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that police must obtain a search
warrant in order to get access to cellphone location information.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 5-to-4 decision, joining the court's
four liberals. The majority declared that the Fourth Amendment guarantees
an expectation of privacy and that allowing police to obtain moment-by-moment
tracking of an individual's cellphone location is a kind of surveillance
that the framers of the Constitution did not want to occur without a search
warrant."

That's right. What
took so long?

"The chief justice said
that this sort of tracking information is akin to wearing an electronic
ankle-bracelet monitoring device and that the citizens of the country are
protected from that kind of monitoring unless police can show a judge that
there is probable cause of a crime that justifies it."

Here's the caveat:

"He stressed, however,
that this is a narrowly focused opinion that leaves intact other precedents
when it comes to dealing with financial information, banking and office
records."

"Roberts noted that the
decision also allows for warrantless cell-tower location information searches
in emergencies and for national-security purposes."

The latter leaves the
door wide open for continued abuse by the criminal jackbooted bastards
in blue, right, Sheriff?

"The four dissenters were
led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was joined by the court's three most
conservative members, justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
In a rare move, they each filed separate dissents.

"At oral arguments in
November, the justices seemed torn about whether to break with the so-called
third party doctrine. Adopted decades ago, that doctrine says that there
is no reasonable expectation of privacy when an individual shares information
with a third party — for example, the phone company, which knows what telephone
numbers the individual calls and receives. Therefore, police do not have
to get a search warrant to gain access to those numbers. But in recent
years, the justices have expressed discomfort with that rule of law as
applied to the modern digital age, when cellphones carried in a person's
pocket can track locations day and night, and when email and text addresses
tell a huge amount about an individual's contacts and lifestyle."

CBS News reports:

"The Supreme Court says
police generally need a search warrant if they want to track criminal suspects'
movements by collecting information about where they've used their cellphones.
The justices' 5-4 decision Friday is a victory for privacy in the digital
age. Police collection of cellphone tower information has become an important
tool in criminal investigations. The outcome marks a big change in
how police can obtain phone records. Authorities can go to the phone company
and obtain information about the numbers dialed from a home telephone without
presenting a warrant."

The latter was one of
the earliest bastardizations of privacy by the judiciary. Give the
jackbooted bastards in law enforcement an inch, they take a mile.
Took it as carte blanche to track vis a vis cellphones.

"Roberts said the court's
decision is limited to cellphone tracking information and does not affect
other business records, including those held by banks. He also wrote
that police still can respond to an emergency and obtain records without
a warrant."

This leaves the door ajar
for police to continue doing precisely what they've done to date, just
a bit more cautiously, careful not to get caught. ... Right,
Sheriff? Remains exceptional abuse of power that is nowhere near
resolved.

Cowardly fail to financially
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6-15-18

ZTE receives special treatment.
NPR reports:

"Commerce Secretary Wilbur
Ross on Thursday announced a deal with Chinese telecommunications company
ZTE that includes a $1 billion fine — a move that may indicate progress
in high-stakes trade talks between the U.S. and China. "This is a
pretty strict settlement, the strictest and largest fine that has ever
been brought by the Commerce Department against any violator of export
controls ," Ross said in an interview with CNBC."

Think so?

"The agreement was immediately
criticized by senators of both parties. "The Trump administration
is giving ZTE and China the green light to spy on Americans and sell our
technology to North Korea and Iran, as long as it pays a fine that amounts
to a tiny fraction of its revenue," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.

"Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.,
tweeted: "I assure you with 100% confidence that #ZTE is a much greater
national security threat than steel from Argentina or Europe. #VeryBadDeal"

No problem with the above
or the following?

"The U.S. had imposed
sanctions on ZTE for illegal sales to Iran and North Korea, but the Chinese
company agreed to take corrective action. When U.S. regulators found that
ZTE had not complied with the terms of the agreement, they cut off the
firm from its U.S. parts suppliers. The move was described as a "death
sentence" by the company, which employs 70,000 people in China. But
last month, President Trump tweeted that "too many jobs in China" were
being lost because of the U.S. action and that he had instructed the Commerce
Department to find a solution."

In another article, NPR
reports:

"Days after the Trump
administration agreed to restore Chinese telecom firm ZTE's access to its
U.S. parts suppliers, a bipartisan group of senators moved to block the
deal. An amendment sponsored by Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Chris Van
Hollen, D-Md., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., added language to the National
Defense Authorization Act to reinstate a ban on ZTE buying U.S. components.
That sanction was put in place after the Chinese company violated the terms
of an earlier agreement to punish it for illegal sales to Iran and North
Korea."

Finally, bipartisan agreement
to stand up to the nazi fuhrer. About time.

"Late Monday, the senators
announced they had written language into the defense package that keeps
the penalties against ZTE in place. The amendment also bans U.S. government
agencies from buying or leasing equipment from ZTE and its Chinese rival,
Huawei, and bars U.S. loans to the companies. Sen. Cotton explained
on Twitter that ZTE has extensive ties with the Chinese Communist Party
and a record of doing business with North Korean and Iran. He said the
threat posed by the mobile phone giant and its rival, Huawei, "is too great
to ignore."

"Pleased
the amendment I introduced with @ChrisVanHollen & @SenSchumer is included
in the NDAA. The threat Huawei & ZTE pose to our national security
is too great to ignore. This amendment will help keep Americans' private
info out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. —
Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 11, 2018

"Great
news! Our bipartisan amendment restoring penalties on #ZTE is included
in the #NDAA bill the Senate will be advancing to later this evening. —
Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 11, 2018"

This bipartisan action
was desperately needed. Timely.

"The NDAA is considered
a must-pass defense package; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced
on Monday that it is "the top item on our to-do list. And we'll tackle
it this week." The authorization must pass both houses of Congress."

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6-15-18

Facebook continues to
have problems. CBS News reports:

"As many as 14 million
Facebook (FB) users had their posts shared with a broader audience than
they intended. The social-media giant says a software glitch for
10 days last month switched privacy settings to "public" for millions even
if they had wanted only friends to see their posts. "We have fixed
this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and
asking them to review any posts they made during that time," Erin Egan,
Facebook's chief privacy officer, said in an emailed statement. "We'd like
to apologize for this mistake."

Think that's good enough?

"The disclosure is the
most recent in a long-running bout of privacy blunders by Facebook, still
reeling from March revelations that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica
had accessed information on some 87 million Facebook users without their
knowledge. More recently, Facebook is facing scrutiny from lawmakers for
its deals with Chinese companies."

Wake up.

Cowardly fail to financially
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rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

6-15-18

Think Facebook doesn't
have continuing privacy issues? NPR reports:

"Facebook is embroiled
in a snafu that exposed users' private postings and made them public, the
company admitted Thursday. For four days, between May 18 to 22, Facebook
tested a new feature that inadvertently switched the default settings for
14 million users from private to public allowing anyone on the Internet
view status updates that were intended only for private audiences.
"We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly
when some people were creating their Facebook posts," Chief Privacy Officer
Erin Egan, said in a statement."

Cowardly fail to financially
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6-8-18

Our government still has
done nothing about the following issue repeatedly covered here and elsewhere.
The
Washington Post reports:

"A federal study found
signs that surveillance devices for intercepting cellphone calls and texts
were operating near the White House and other sensitive locations in the
Washington area last year. A Department of Homeland Security program
discovered evidence of the surveillance devices, called IMSI catchers,
as part of federal testing last year, according to a letter from DHS to
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on May 22. The letter didn't specify what entity
operated the devices and left open the possibility that there could be
alternative explanations for the suspicious cellular signals collected
by the federal testing program last year."

What does it take to investigate
this? Think NSA and the FCC don't know what's going on?

"The discovery bolsters
years of independent research suggesting that foreign intelligence agencies
use sophisticated interception technology to spy on officials working within
the hub of federal power in the nation’s capital. Experts in surveillance
technology say that IMSI catchers — sometimes known by one popular brand
name, StingRay — are a standard part of the tool kit for many foreign intelligence
services, including for such geopolitical rivals as Russia and China."

Also used by the criminal
jackbooted bastards in blue right here in Nazi America. Without
a warrant. A fascist police-state quickly transitioning to the Trump
nazi's Fourth Reich.

"A DHS spokesman confirmed
the contents of the letter to Wyden but declined further comment."

Why? The public
has a right to know.

"This admission from DHS
bolsters my concern about stingrays and other spying devices being used
to spy on Americans’ phones," Wyden said in a statement on Thursday. "Given
the reports of rogue spying devices being identified near the White House
and other government facilities, I fear that foreign intelligence services
could target the president and other senior officials."

Not only a foreign threat,
but perpetrated as well by our own goddamned government on its citizens.

Cowardly fail to financially
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6-8-18

Never ends. CBS
News reports:

"Facebook is pushing back
against a media report saying that it provided extensive information about
its users and their friends to third parties like phone makers. The New
York Times reported Sunday that Facebook struck data-sharing deals with
at least 60 device makers, including Apple and Amazon, raising more concerns
about what users give up when they use Facebook. Facebook says it
disagrees with reporting by the paper regarding software it rolled out
10 years ago that helped get Facebook on to devices like iPhones. Ime Archibong,
vice president of product partnerships, said in blog post that Facebook
has maintained tight control over the technology, known as application
programming interfaces, or APIs, and that it is not aware of any abuse
by the companies that it teamed with. The Times report says Facebook
allowed the companies access to the data of friends of the user without
their explicit consent, a practice that landed the company in the crosshairs
of Congress during the Cambridge Analytica scandal."

Cowardly fail to financially
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rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
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6-1-18

In follow up to the last
edition, CBS News reports:

"Amazon (AMZN) is drawing
heat on multiple fronts as a result of its facial-recognition technology.
Days after being blasted by civil-liberty advocates for being in the government
surveillance business, the retailer found itself at odds with a city pilot-testing
the software."

Tough, isn't it?
What could Orlando possibly been thinking involved in this shit in the
first place? Clearly, privacy, all civil and constitutional rights
and liberties mean nothing to these jackasses. When called on it,
suddenly get their shorts in a wad? Give me a break.

"Records publicized by
the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday showed the Orlando (Florida)
Police Department was trying out Amazon's facial-recognition service, dubbed
"Rekognition." Stories, including one by CBS MoneyWatch, included references
to a video showing Ranju Das, director of Rekognition at Amazon, describing
how Orlando was using the service. "They have cameras all over
the city. The authorized cameras are then streaming the data," he said.
"We analyze the video in real time, [and] search against the collection
of faces they have." The depiction didn't go over so well in Orlando,
leading city officials to scramble to contain the damage."

What the hell did these
achingly clueless assholes expect? The public is growing increasingly
tired of this crap.

"In a statement to the
Orlando Sentinel, an Orlando police spokesman said the department's use
of Rekognition is limited to eight city-owned cameras and that no images
from the public are being used in the pilot."

Believe it? Think
so? Only a matter of time. ... How do you know a police spokesman
is lying? His lips move.

"To be clear, this partnership
with Amazon includes testing to see if the technology even works," the
spokesperson told the newspaper. "As it is still very early on in this
process, we have no data that supports or does not support that the Rekognition
technology works."

Who the hell cares whether
or not it works? The problem is the principle. Too damned aggressively
stupid to understand? Delusionally believe the public wants to live
in a surveillance state? -- Which is exactly what has been happening
for quite some time now. -- Cameras nearly ubiquitous. Now
this? Facial recognition. F--k this goddamned government.

"The video featuring Das
at a recent developer's conference in South Korea now includes the following
clarification from Amazon: "Between minutes 31:29 and 32:19 of this video,
an Amazon Web Services (AWS) spokesperson got confused and misspoke about
the City of Orlando's use of AWS technologies. The City of Orlando is testing
Amazon's Rekognition Video and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams internally
to find ways to increase public safety and operational efficiency, but
it's not correct that they've installed cameras all over the city or are
using in production. We apologize for any misunderstanding."

What misunderstanding?
Absolutely nothing to do with public safety. Crock of shit.
Only a matter of time before this goddamned technology is fully in place,
uses drivers license photos and others to track in real time. A de
facto fascist police-state quickly transitioning to the Trump nazi's Fourth
Reich. Hear the rumble? An unwanted dreaded second
American revolution catastrophically looming.

Cowardly fail to financially
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6-1-18

Think facial recognition
is the only exigent threat to privacy, all civil and constitutional rights
and liberties? NPR reports:

"Among the lawmakers'
concerns: How Facebook might make up possible abuses to its users — and
whether Zuckerberg himself is telling the truth when he promises to obey
Europe's privacy laws. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took questions
from members of the European Union Parliament on Tuesday about allegations
that personal data of European Facebook users was misused. The testy session
ended with several members of Parliament complaining that Zuckerberg had
failed to address their most pressing questions."

So what else is new?
The crafty son of a bitch earlier failed to do so right here in front of
Congress recently. Forget? It's the money, stupid.
Privacy means shit squat to the corporate management suite.

"Zuckerberg conceded that
Facebook had not been ready [to]
fight off fake news that spread quickly on its site. And he apologized
for the improper use of millions of users' data to help political campaigns,
after an analytics company gained information that had been collected by
a quiz app."

Meaningless apology.
Rings hollow. It's how the bastard and his corporation line their
pockets. Market your private data. Their business
model. Wake up. You've been bamboozled. Hoodwinked.
F--ked over.

"One unanswered question
centered on whether Facebook cross-references data from its users and users
of WhatsApp. But many others were also passed by, including anti-trust
questions and queries about how the company treats its users. "Will
you allow users to escape targeting advertising?" Belgian Philippe Lamberts
said as the meeting was nearly over. A leader of the Greens party,
Lamberts added, "I mean, I asked you six yes or no questions — I got not
a single answer. And of course, well, you asked for this format for a reason."

Certainly, did.
For damned good reason. Make it easier to obfuscate. LOL.

"I'll make sure we follow
up and get you answers for those," Zuckerberg said."

Think so?
LOL.

One thing for sure.
The Europeans are no push over. Didn't tolerate his bullshit like
our bought and paid for politicians recently did:

"Britain's Syed Kamall
of the European Conservative Group asked Zuckerberg, "How can non-users
stop Facebook collecting their data?" He also asked how Facebook commercializes
that data. Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian leader of the centrist Alliance
of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, opened his remarks by comparing Zuckerberg
to the CEO of an "out of control" big data company in novelist Dave Eggers'
book The Circle."

No question.

"It seems to me, very
near to reality," Verhofstadt said, noting that the fictional company's
data was also used to affect elections. He added, "also the fact
that maybe you have less control, or no control, about your own company
for the moment, because you have to apologize now – I think in total you
apologized now 15 or 16 times" in the last decade."

Meaningless talk.
Empty rhetoric. Disingenuous phony bullshit.

"Are you capable to fix
it?" Verhofstadt asked Zuckerberg. Before mentioning the way public regulations
cover banks – which often say they will fix their own problems. He then
moved on to equally pointed questions. "Are you telling the truth,
in fact, to us?" he asked the Facebook CEO about the company's pledge to
adhere to Europe's privacy laws."Since the outbreak of Cambridge Analytica,
you have massively transferred European data of non-European citizens out
from Europe, away from European servers," Verhofstadt said. "I have
to tell you, that's against the regulations," Verhofstadt said, wagging
his finger. He added that the company had taken the same step with data
it has collected about Europeans who are not Facebook users. He then
asked, "Will you compensate the European Facebook users?"

Clearly, the Europeans
are asking the right questions, ferociously pointed questions, proverbially
holding this lying bastard's feet to the fire. Unlike our own goddamned
useless, worthless politicians, both parties.

Coup de grace? Get
this:

"Verhofstadt asked Zuckerberg
whether Facebook will open its books to show whether the company is a monopoly
– and how it might resolve that question." "I really think we have
a big problem here," Verhofstadt said. "You have to ask yourself
how you will be remembered," he said, looking at Zuckerberg: "As one of
the three big Internet giants, together with Steve Jobs ... and Bill Gates,
who have enriched our world and our societies – or at the other hand, in
fact, [as] a genius who created a digital monster, that is destroying our
democracies and our societies."

No kidding. These
improperly regulated corporations remain out of control top-down, bottom-up.
Have become a systemic cancer tearing at the very root of what is supposed
to be a democratic republic. A democratic republic, now, in name
only.

Cowardly fail to financially
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"The U.S. takes credit
for creating the Internet, and the European Union seems determined to govern
it. On Friday, a sweeping new directive goes into effect called the General
Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Taken together, its 99 articles represent
the biggest ever change to data privacy laws. The new rules have implications
for U.S. Internet users too."

Eventually, will likely
be implemented here, to at least some extent, since will be extremely difficult
for the corporate management suite to maintain different standards for
Europe and the rest of the world community including the U.S..

"It's a new law that protects
residents of the EU — people living there, including Americans. (If you're
a European and live in the U.S., you're not protected.) Under GDPR, all
companies that have an Internet presence — including large American companies
like Google, Microsoft and Facebook — have to comply. At the most
basic level, GDPR expands what counts as personal data and your rights
over that data."

Desperately needed here
as well. Again, will likely eventually happen since it will be exceptionally
difficult for world-wide corporations to maintain and implement two different
standards. Should they make a mistake, European fines imposed will
be enormous. ... Doesn't your heart bleed?

"The directive says people
have to give permission for a company to collect their data. A company
can't just sign you up without explicitly asking. And the more personal
the data — say, biometrics, which is considered a special category under
the law — the ask must be even more clear. Europeans have a right
to have their data deleted if they don't want a company to keep it. Companies
have to delete the data without undue delay, or face a penalty."

Desperately needed here
as well:

"If you're American, you're
probably getting a lot of emails and push notifications from your apps
and maybe even newsletters you forgot you signed up for. For example, new
privacy notices from Spotify and eBay say you can request to delete personal
data they've stored. "But there's nothing binding about it," says
attorney Michael R. Cohen, who is based in Minneapolis. "In the U.S., the
business model is pretty much, companies can do what they want, so long
as there isn't a specific law prohibiting it." The U.S. has laws protecting
data privacy for health and financial records, and and for children. "Other
than that, we're pretty much the Wild West," Cohen says."

It's how these bastards
make money. They sell your personal data. -- Don't agree to
their
terms and conditions? Get denied access to their 'services.'
These greedy sons of bitches truly believe they own your
data, you don't. This needs to change.

"That's how as many as
87 million Facebook users had their profiles land in the hands of a political
operative. Last month, in testimony before Congress, Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg said he'd give Americans all the same controls Europeans have."

He lied. The following
is bullshit:

"We believe that everyone
around the world deserves good privacy controls. We've had a lot of these
controls in place for years. The GDPR requires us to do a few more things,
and we're going to extend that to the world," he said."

Not so.

"In reality, Zuckerberg
isn't offering the same protections. For Facebook users, there is a big
difference between Europe and the U.S. when it comes to what is collected
by default. In Europe, Facebook has to get permission to do facial recognition
— and it's not the default setting. But in the U.S., it is. American users
have to click through screens to opt out."

"One side argues that
GDPR will be terrible for competition, giving big businesses a leg up over
small ones. Small companies won't be able to afford the millions of dollars
in expenses that come with managing and protecting data. So they won't
survive."

Did it ever occur to the
business community they truly don't need this data? That a different
business model is desperately called for?

"Another camp argues that
consumers don't trust businesses on the Internet anymore anyway (as evidenced
by the rise of ad blockers). If that's the real problem, the laws will
make a difference by making businesses think more deeply about what data
they collect and why, and GDPR may improve the quality of the Internet."

The public is clearly
tired of endless, relentless marketing, -- and more importantly, methods
used. Including invasion of privacy.

Cowardly fail to financially
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rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

"As secret recordings
go, the Portland couple's conversation was pretty mundane: They were talking
about hardwood floors. But their Amazon Echo was listening and recording
their discussion. The device then sent the recording to someone in their
contacts — without the couple's knowledge. The wife, identified only
as Danielle, told Seattle TV station KIRO 7 that they learned something
was amiss when they received a phone call from the husband's employee who
lived in Seattle, telling them what he had inadvertently received. He told
them to unplug their Alexa devices right away. Danielle says she
and her husband went around the house unplugging their devices — which
they had in each room, controlling their home's temperature, lights and
security. The employee sent the couple the sound file that the Echo
had sent to him, and they were shocked to realize they had essentially
been bugged."

Surprised?

"I felt invaded," Danielle
told KIRO. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately, I said, 'I'm never plugging
that device in again, because I can't trust it.' "How did this happen?
Here's Amazon's explanation of the unsettling episode: "Echo woke up due
to a word in background conversation sounding like 'Alexa.' Then, the subsequent
conversation was heard as a 'send message' request. At which point, Alexa
said out loud 'To whom?' At which point, the background conversation was
interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out
loud, '[contact name], right?' Alexa then interpreted background conversation
as 'right'. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating
options to make this case even less likely." That's right — at least
five times in a row, Alexa heard background conversation and misconstrued
it as very specific directives. And it all happened without the people
in the room knowing that the device was listening, much less recording
their conversation and shipping it out, supposedly on their behalf."

Unintentional? Think
so? Wake up. Get this:

"Last year, a North Carolina
man said the same thing had happened to him: His Echo recorded 20 seconds
of his conversation and sent it to his insurance agent without his knowledge.
Why was the Echo recording the conversation in the first place? "Amazon's
Echo uses seven microphones and noise-canceling tech to listen out for
its wake word," Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler explains.
"Doing so, it records about a second of ambient sound on the device, which
it constantly discards and replaces. But once it thinks it hears its wake
word, the Echo's blue light ring activates and it begins sending a recording
of what it hears to Amazon's computers."

Convenient, isn't it?

"While "home assistants"
such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod have been big sellers
in the past few years, they've brought with them a litany of privacy and
practical concerns. There was the time an Echo ordered a $170 dollhouse
for a 6-year-old who asked Alexa for one."

Cowardly fail to financially
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rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

6-1-18

California, despite home
to Silicon Valley, is considering standing up for digital privacy.
NPR reports:

"As Europe's sweeping
new privacy law went into effect on Friday, California voters may get to
decide on strict privacy laws for their state. An initiative likely
headed for November's ballot in California would be one of the broadest
online privacy regulations in the U.S. and could impact standards throughout
the country. One of the initiative's biggest backers is Alastair
Mactaggart, a San Francisco real estate developer. Mactaggart has put more
than $2 million of his own money into getting the California Consumer Privacy
Act of 2018 on the ballot. The initiative hasn't been officially certified
by the state, but it has gotten more than 600,000 signatures, nearly twice
what it needs to qualify."

Step in the right direction.

"Mactaggart recalls the
moment about four years ago that turned him into a privacy advocate. He
asked a Google engineer at a cocktail party whether he should be worried
about his privacy. "He said, 'Oh if you just knew how much we knew about
you, you'd be really worried,' " recalls Mactaggart. Mactaggart says
he and a small group of his neighbors consulted with academics, lawyers
and technologists to write a bill they hope will curb privacy abuses. "What
people are concerned about is misuse of their data," Mactaggart says, "and
so we give people the right to say, 'Stop selling my information.' "
If voters approve the measure, businesses will be required to have a "clear
and conspicuous link" on their website's homepage titled "Do Not Sell My
Personal Information." The link would take users to a page where they can
opt out of having their data sold or shared."

Has to send a chill up
the gutless spine of the hopelessly greedy corporate management suite.

"Mactaggart says the proposed
law would not prevent Facebook, Google or a local newspaper from collecting
users' data and using it to target ads to them. But users will have a right
to stop companies from sharing or selling their data. And businesses would
be required to disclose the categories of information they have on users
— including home addresses, employment information and characteristics
such as race and gender."

Certainly, nowhere good
enough, but indeed a step in the right direction:

"The measure has the backing
of consumer advocacy groups, such as Consumers Union. Justin Brookman,
Consumers Union's director of privacy and technology policy, says Europe's
new law is stricter. "This ballot initiative is actually pretty modest,"
he says. "In some ways, I wish it would go further." Still, if the
California act passes, it will be one of the broadest privacy laws in the
U.S. because it will affect anyone who goes on the Internet in California.
And because California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, Brookman
predicts many companies will implement the same standards nationally."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

6-1-18

Are they kidding?
CBS News reports:

"Facebook is expanding
its fight against revenge porn with a pilot program that asks users to
send their naked photos so Facebook can block the photos before someone
else shares them. Facebook's been testing the system in Australia and is
extending the trial to the U.S., Britain and Canada, BBC News reports."

Think they won't get sold,
passed on, shared, etc.? LOL.

"In a Facebook post on
Tuesday, Facebook's Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis said the company
was updating its pilot program targeting the non-consensual sharing of
images on the platform. Rather than having to report an image after it's
already been shared around Facebook (the company already has a system in
place for reporting and removing those images), Facebook will let users
upload an image before it's been seen by others, CNET reports."

Believe it?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

5-25-18

Highly reminiscent
of our outrageously bought and paid for judiciary, Llano County prosecutors,
Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards in black
who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge, do as they
please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider the following.
It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything our formerly
great country once stood for. No longer.

In follow up to a recent
edition, more of the same. The public needs to stand up. The
Washington Post reports:

"Amazon has been essentially
giving away facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon
and Orlando, according to documents obtained by American Civil Liberties
Union of Northern California, paving the way for a rollout of technology
that is causing concern among civil rights groups."

For damned good reason.
Direct threat to life, liberty, all civil and constitutional rights and
liberties. A de facto fascist police-state quickly transitioning
to the Trump nazi's Fourth Reich. These bastards at Amazon
are traitors. Willingly lining their pockets off forfeiture of civil
and constitutional rights and liberties.

"Amazon is providing the
technology, known as Rekognition, as well as consulting services, according
to the documents, which the ACLU obtained through a Freedom of Information
Act request. A coalition of civil rights groups, in a letter released
Tuesday, called on Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement
because it could lead to the expansion of surveillance of vulnerable communities."

Precisely, the intention.
To be followed with ubiquitous surveillance of all communities.
Orwell's 1984 comes to fruition.

“We demand that Amazon
stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave
threat to customers and communities across the country,” the groups wrote
in the letter. Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsey did not directly address
the concerns of civil rights groups. “Amazon requires that customers comply
with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services,” she said,
referring to Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud software division
that houses the facial recognition program. “When we find that AWS services
are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use
our services.”

Not good enough.
Nowhere near. The fact this woman would not directly answer concerns
speaks volumes. Reinforces criticism by ACLU and others.

"She said that the technology
has many useful purposes, and that customers have used it to find abducted
people and amusement parks have used the program to find lost children.
During the royal wedding this past weekend, clients used Rekognition to
identify wedding attendees, she said. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos
is the owner of The Washington Post.)"

This woman cluelessly
puts lipstick on a pig. Expects the public to buy the bullshit.
Such surveillance is a prelude to loss of liberty.

"The details about Amazon’s
program illustrate the proliferation of cutting-edge technologies deep
into American society — often without public vetting or debate. Axon, the
maker of Taser electroshock weapons and the wearable body cameras for police,
has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition for its body-worn cameras,
prompting a similar backlash from civil rights groups. Hundreds of
Google employees protested last month to demand that the company stop providing
artificial intelligence to the Pentagon to help analyze drone footage."

Anything for a buck.
Up to and including forfeiture of privacy, then liberty.

"Amazon publicly introduced
Rekognition in November 2016, with the promise that its clients could benefit
from artificial intelligence technology developed by the company’s scientists
to analyze billions of images and videos daily. Marketers could use the
image recognition software to recognize celebrities in their videos, while
owners of dating apps could use the program to identify unwanted suggestive
or explicit content, according to the company’s website."

Time for Congress to get
up off its useless, worthless collective ass. This is a direct threat
to liberty, no more than imposition of a surveillance state:

“Once powerful surveillance
systems like these are built and deployed, the harm can’t be undone. We’re
talking about a technology that will supercharge surveillance in our communities,”
said Nicole Ozer, Technology and Civil Liberties Director for the ACLU
of Northern California. She said the technology could be used “to track
protesters, target immigrants, and spy on entire neighborhoods.”

"The documents provide
a detailed look at how Amazon is marketing Rekognition. It can identify
up to 100 people in a crowd, the documents said."

Think law enforcement
isn't already egregiously out of control?

"The sheriff’s office
of Washington County, Ore., built a database of 300,000 mug shots of suspected
criminals that officers could have Rekognition scan against footage of
potential suspects in real-time. The footage could come from police body
cameras and public and private cameras. The county pays Amazon between
$6 and $12 a month for the service, a county spokesman said."

"According to the documents,
Amazon asked the county to tout its experience with Rekognition to other
public sector customers, including a manufacturer of body cameras."

All the more reason to
boycott Amazon.

"Deputy Jeff Talbot, public
information officer for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, said the
program was not operating in the shadows and had been the subject of several
news local stories. He pointed out that jail booking photos are already
public and that the software simply allows officers to scan them instantaneously
and in real-time, and compare them against footage of actual suspects,
which is a valuable contribution to public safety. “Our goal is to inform
the public about the work we’re doing to solve crimes. It is not mass surveillance
or untargeted surveillance.”

Booking photos should
not be made public until conviction. How many innocent people have
been falsely accused by the criminal jackbooted bastards in blue only to
be exonerated at trial, or have charges dropped for lack of evidence?
There is nothing to prevent these sons of bitches from adding drivers license
photos and others to the database. Think that won't happen? It
is mass surveillance by definition. For this jackbooted son of
a bitch to claim otherwise is proof positive he is a congenital liar.

Raw nazism:

"He could not say how
many crimes the program had helped solve and added that the software wasn’t
always accurate. But he said officers were trained not to rely exclusively
on the software to make decisions, and it was just an additional tool in
the officer’s tool kit. For the cheap price Amazon was offering, he said
it made sense to test out the service."

What it is remains out
of control law enforcement egregiously abrogating its falsely sworn oath
to uphold the United States Constitution. Amazon? Traitors.
Anything for a buck. Think they won't eventually massively line corporate
coffers as a result of this scourge?

"Zahra Billoo, executive
director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations San Francisco Bay
area office, one of the groups that signed the letter, said many people
who are booked into jail are not always charged with a crime or are proved
innocent. She said that she worried that people’s civil rights are violated
when law enforcement keeps their images in a database even after they are
proved innocent or were never charged. She said Amazon was contributing
to these violations by making it easier to scan people’s faces, repeatedly
exposing them to surveillance. In addition to the ACLU, the coalition
of about 40 groups included Color of Change, Human Rights Watch, Muslim
Advocates and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Amazon is one of
many companies selling artificial intelligence tools such as facial recognition
and image-scanning to business clients. Microsoft offers a rival service,
called Facial Recognition API. A crop of start-ups market the ability to
scan the emotions on people’s faces as they walk in and out of stores.
Such technology has been touted as a way to prevent shoplifting."

Raw nazism. Voodoo
psycho babble. An exigent threat to all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties.

The above quotes are courtesy
of a most gifted insightful writer, Elizabeth Dwoskin.

NPR reports:

"Tech companies are trying
to sell police real-time facial recognition systems, which can track and
identify people as they walk down the street. As NPR reported two weeks
ago, American police have generally held off, but there's new evidence
that one police department — Orlando, Fla. — has decided to try it out.
What's more, Orlando ordered its facial recognition system from Amazon."

Time to boycott these
goddamned traitors.

"This information was
uncovered by the ACLU, which noticed that law enforcement customers were
mentioned in the marketing of Amazon's "Rekognition" service. Until now,
American police have used facial recognition primarily to compare still
photos from crime scenes with mug shots. But now Amazon and Orlando are
taking it further, by using facial recognition to spot people in real time."

Raw nazism.

"City of Orlando is a
launch partner of ours," Amazon's Ranju Das recently told a developer conference
in Seoul, South Korea. "They have cameras all over the city. The authorized
cameras are then streaming the data ... we are a subscriber to the stream,
we analyze the video in real time, search against the collection of faces
they have." In this video presentation, Das is seen saying the system
can be set up to notify the city if cameras see a "person of interest,"
and it could be used to reconstruct a person's past movements. He showed
the conference a demo of real-time facial recognition using video from
a "traffic cam that was provided by the city of Orlando."

How many innocent people
will be harassed by the criminal jackbooted bastards in blue as a result?
Time to boycott Amazon and others engaging in this. If victimized,
sue the living shit out of not only the criminal jackbooted bastards in
blue, but these corporations as well.

"In a written statement,
the Orlando Police Department called the Amazon facial recognition system
a "pilot program" and said it "will be used in accordance with current
and applicable law."

They're liars. Do
as they please. Ubiquitous problem throughout all law enforcement.

"The statement also says
the department "is not using the technology in an investigative capacity
or in any public spaces at this time."

Believe it? If not
yet, when?

"It did not say whether
the system has been used that way in the past, or will be in the future.
NPR tried to follow up, but OPD said it wasn't doing interviews on the
topic."

Disingenuous, lying jackbooted
bastards.

"Amazon also wouldn't
do an interview with NPR. In a written statement, it pointed out that its
visual analytics tools have a wide range of applications beyond policing,
and that "[o]ur quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed
new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology.
Imagine if customers couldn't buy a computer because it was possible to
use that computer for illegal purposes?"

More disingenuous bullshit.
Safeguards could have indeed been built into all software and hardware
to prevent this abuse of privacy. Have not been. Instead, these
bastards line their pockets off the abuse.

"Amazon's statement added,
"[W]e require our customers to comply with the law and be responsible when
using Amazon Rekognition."

Jesus Christ. Crock
of shit. Give me a break. These sons of bitches have absolutely
no regard, no respect for the intelligence of the public.

"There are no laws explicitly
barring law enforcement from using real-time facial recognition, and the
constitutionality has not been tested by higher courts. Matt Cagle
of the ACLU of Northern California says he's disturbed by what he sees
as a lack of transparency and public engagement, as police and tech companies
work together to bring this new tool to American streets. "Amazon
is handing governments a surveillance system primed for abuse," Cagle says.
"And that's why we're blowing the whistle right now."

Not good enough.
Sue their asses. Get them into court.

"The ACLU filed public
records requests for Amazon's communications with Orlando and another Rekognition
customer, the Washington County Sheriff's Office, near Portland, Ore. Cagle
says the resulting documents show a company eager to push law enforcement
customers toward real-time facial recognition and connect it to other devices,
such as officer body cameras. This is typical of companies that sell
facial recognition. Most try to encourage customers to expand the applications
and powers of the technology. What makes Amazon's offering different is
the price. "We pay literally a couple of dollars a month to do this
service," says Washington County Sheriff's Office spokesman Deputy Jeff
Talbot. His department uses Amazon's Rekognition to scan faces in photos
of suspects taken by deputies in the field."

Again, time to boycott
these sons of bitches and others who offer similar 'services.'

"The Washington County
Sheriff's Office says it does not use Rekognition in real time and doesn't
intend to. Cagle says that could easily change. The marketing of
Rekognition to law enforcement is still in its infancy, but he's worried
it could quickly become dominant, given Amazon's market clout as the world's
leading cloud services company. "Activating a real-time facial recognition
system, that can track people, if the technology is there, could be as
simple as flipping a switch in some communities," Cagle says."

This is an exigent threat
to liberty, all civil and constitutional rights and liberties. A
threat to life as well. Forget? The criminal jackbooted bastards
in blue are already murdering innocent unarmed civilians. Wake
up. Before too late.

The above quotes are courtesy
of a most gifted insightful writer, Martin Kaste.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

5-18-18

The Trump nazi concerns
himself more with Chinese business interests than the cyber security of
the United States. The following is appalling. The Washington
Post reports:

"President Trump’s surprising
promise Sunday to help bring Chinese telecom giant ZTE back from the brink
of collapse undercuts top law enforcement and intelligence officials, who
have warned for years that the company’s products could be used for cyberespionage
in the United States. ZTE has close ties with China’s government,
and U.S. officials have raised concerns that its phones and other devices
could be used as surveillance tools against Americans."

Clearly, Trump remains
out to lunch.

"Lawmakers immediately
pointed out the contradiction. “Our intelligence agencies have warned that
ZTE technology and phones pose a major cyber security threat,” Rep. Adam
B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee,
tweeted at Trump yesterday. “You should care more about our national security
than Chinese jobs.” As Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in a tweet
this morning, the "problem with ZTE isn't jobs & trade, it's national
security & espionage"

Wouldn't want to confuse
our nazi fuhrer with the truth, would we?

"The head of the FBI and
other intelligence chiefs in congressional testimony this year urged American
citizens to steer clear of products from ZTE and its Chinese rival Huawei.
And just two weeks ago, the Pentagon banned the companies’ phones from
being sold on military bases, saying they “may pose an unacceptable risk
to Department's personnel, information and mission.”

NBC reports:

"President Donald Trump
said Sunday he has instructed his Commerce Department to help get a Chinese
telecommunications company "back into business" after the U.S. government
cut off access to its American suppliers. At issue is that department's
move last month to block the ZTE Corp., a major supplier of telecoms networks
and smartphones based in southern China, from importing American components
for seven years. The U.S. accused ZTE of misleading American regulators
after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and
Iran.

"President
Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone
company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China
lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done! —
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2018"

Mark of a sane president?
A man who hasn't betrayed his oath of office? Treasonously, traitorously,
treacherously placed best interests of a foreign company that's compromised
U.S. cyber security ahead of the best interests of the American public?

NBC reports:

"The nation's top counterintelligence
official told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that penetration
of the U.S. market by the Chinese telecom firm ZTE could pose a national
security risk to the United States."

Imagine that. Couldn't
be, could it? LOL.

"His comments come two
days after President Donald Trump tweeted that he was working with the
president of China to help ZTE, which has been sanctioned by the Treasury
and Commerce departments for doing business with Iran and North Korea."

Think Trump's not an idiot,
-- or lining his pockets?

"Bill Evanina, who is
facing a confirmation vote to head the newly created National Counterintelligence
and Security Center, said he was not up to speed on the sanctions against
ZTE, and he declined to say whether lifting them would be a good idea."

"But under questioning
by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Evanina said U.S. intelligence agencies are
on record as assessing that Chinese telecommunication firms are used as
a vehicle by the Chinese government to conduct espionage. And, answering
a question from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., he said he would never use a
ZTE phone."

He wouldn't?
LOL.

"President Xi of China,
and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE,
a way to get back into business, fast," Trump tweeted Sunday. "Too many
jobs in China lost."

Imagine that. LOL.
... Did they line your pockets, Mr. 'President?' -- Or, are
you simply an idiot?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

"Facebook has been secretly
deleting some messages CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent through its Messenger application,
an option that hasn't been available to most of the social network's 2.2
billion users. The company says it has been removing Zuckerberg's messages
from the inboxes of various people for several years. The recipients of
Zuckerberg's messages weren't informed before that happened."

Couldn't be, could it?
LOL.

"Facebook is making the
acknowledgment Friday after TechCrunch first reported the tactic.
Facebook says it began erasing the messages of Zuckerberg and a few other
top executives in 2014 after computer hackers obtained and released emails
from Sony Pictures executives. The Sony messages included disparaging remarks
about movie stars and other people in the entertainment industry."

'Don't do as I do,
do as I say?' LOL.

"Although the ability
to automatically delete sent texts hadn't been previously available, Facebook
says it now plans to make it available to all users. The company apologized
for not doing so sooner."

Jesus Christ. Spare
us. Continue to have a Facebook account? You're stupid.
Get what you deserve.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

4-13-18

Trust government? The
Washington Post reports:

"The Census Bureau plans
to ask people if they are U.S. citizens in the 2020 count of the nation’s
population, igniting fears that the information could be used to target
those in the country illegally."

Precisely, as intended
by the racist AG Sessions nazi, and his fuhrer, the Trump nazi.

"The decision has become
a lightning rod for controversy. More than a dozen states and at least
six cities have sued to block the Trump administration from adding the
question to the 2020 Census, alleging that it would depress turnout in
states with large populations of immigrants. The decennial survey is key
to determining how federal funding is spent nationwide. Census officials
said the question is being reinstated for the first time since 1950 to
help enforce the Voting Rights Act and that there are safeguards in place
to prevent any abuse of the information. It is illegal to release information
that would identify individuals or families."

Matters not. The
bastards still do it. Have a history of doing so:

"But that does not mean
that census data has not been used to target specific populations in the
past. In fact, information from the 1940 Census was secretly used
in one of the worst violations of constitutional rights in U.S. history:
the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In papers
presented in 2000 and 2007, historian Margo J. Anderson of the University
of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and statistician William Seltzer of Fordham University
found evidence that census officials cooperated with the government, providing
data to target Japanese Americans."

No problem with this?
None at all? Wake up. Who's next? Forget?
When the rights of any of us are abrogated, the rights of all of us remain
in severe jeopardy.

"The Japanese American
community had long suspected the Census Bureau of playing a role in the
push to banish 120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly living on the West Coast,
into nearly a dozen internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor
on Dec. 7, 1941, according to former commerce secretary Norman Mineta.
Mineta, who lived in San Jose, was 11 when he and his family were sent
to live in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo. For decades,
though, census officials denied that they had played any role in providing
information."

Goddamned traitorous,
treasonous, treacherous liars.

"According to Anderson
and Seltzer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and military intelligence
agencies began pushing in late 1939 to relax census confidentiality rules
in the hope of accessing data on individuals. But the effort was opposed
by Census Bureau Director William Lane Austin. After the 1940 presidential
election, however, Austin was forced to retire. He was replaced by J.C.
Capt, who backed efforts to remove confidentiality provisions. Capt’s efforts
helped clear the way for other agencies to access the information on Japanese
Americans. In 2000, Anderson and Seltzer found documents that showed
officials with the Census Bureau had provided block-level information of
where those of Japanese ancestry were living in California, Arizona, Wyoming,
Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas. The revelations prompted Kenneth
Prewitt, then director of the U.S. Census Bureau, to issue a public apology.
Prewitt wrote: “The historical record is clear that senior Census Bureau
staff proactively cooperated with the internment, and that census tabulations
were directly implicated in the denial of civil rights to citizens of the
United States who happened also to be of Japanese ancestry.”

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

4-13-18

Too little, too late.
The
Washington Post reports:

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
expressed contrition for allowing third-party apps to grab the data of
its users without their permission and for being “too slow to spot and
respond to Russian interference” during the U.S. election, according to
his prepared remarks published by the House Energy and Commerce Committee."

Rings hollow. Readers
are reminded sharing and sale of personal data is precisely how Facebook
makes money. A business model that remains incompatible with privacy.

"Zuckerberg plans to open
his remarks with a familiar recitation of the social media platform's ability
to link far-flung people together but then pivot into an acknowledgement
of Facebook's increasingly visible dark side."

For years, Zuckerberg
and cohorts ignored the inevitable. Despite all handwriting clearly
on the wall.

"It’s clear now that we
didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well,"
Zuckerberg plans to tell lawmakers."

An impossible, unsolvable
conundrum, -- when your business model is sharing and sale of personal
data.

"That goes for fake news,
foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers
and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,
and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started
Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."

Then do the right thing.
Resign in disgrace. Take personal responsibility for the ruse Facebook
has clearly turned out to be.

"The company has been
reeling since the November 2016 election during which phony news reports
spread widely on its platform and Russian operatives mounted an ambitious
campaign to divide American voters, damage Democrat Hillary Clinton and
bolster the chances of Republican Donald Trump."

The greatest problem with
all this is the fact there were no controls in place to quickly identify
and combat this problem. Facebook was too busy lining its pockets,
expanding with no thought as how best to proceed. Then again, when
your business model is based on sharing and selling, marketing personal
data, what true alternative is there to egregious invasion of privacy?

"Facebook appeared to
be recovering from those controversies until last month’s revelation that
a political consultancy hired by Trump and other Republicans improperly
gained access to data on 87 million Facebook users, including 71 million
Americans. The company acknowledged last week a separate problem in which
“malicious actors” were able to identify and collect data on Facebook users
on such a massive scale that most of the company’s 2.2 billion users were
affected."

More frightening?
Data breaches yet to be discovered and/or reported. Hard to believe
this is the end of it. Here's why:

"As the company has mobilized
to quell rising political opposition, including the possibility of major
legislation affect how technology companies handle user data, Facebook
also is battling government investigations in the United States and Europe.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating violations of a 2011 consent
decree over privacy policy at Facebook that could lead to record fines
against the company."

Not good enough.
Nowhere near. Heads need to roll. People belong in prison.

"Zuckerberg also plans
to appear before a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday. Those remarks are
expected to be similar. "It’s not enough to just connect people,
we have to make sure those connections are positive," Zuckerberg plans
to say in his testimony. "It’s not enough to just give people a voice,
we have to make sure people aren’t using it to hurt people or spread misinformation.
It’s not enough to give people control of their information, we have to
make sure developers they’ve given it to are protecting it too."

Impossible. There
is no way to prevent developers from lining their pockets. Forget?
Greed rules. Only viable way to protect data is not collect it.
Not possible when the business model is sale, marketing of that data.
Precisely, why determined effort of Facebook executives to limit image
damage remains so achingly disingenuous, pointless.

"Facebook has announced
a series of measures in recent weeks to tighten how handles user data,
bring new transparency to who's behind political advertising and work more
openly with outside researchers, who long have complained that the company's
platform was walled off from meaningful analysis of its content and impacts."

Non-sequitur. At
best, Band Aid on an arterial wound.

NPR reports:

"There are a lot of regrets
coming out of Silicon Valley these days as the dark side of the tech revolution
becomes increasingly apparent. From smartphone addiction to the big scandal
involving the misuse of personal information from some 87 million Facebook
users. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg expressed
her regrets in an interview last week with NPR. "We know that we did not
do enough to protect people's data," Sandberg said. "I'm really sorry for
that. Mark [Zuckerberg] is really sorry for that, and what we're doing
now is taking really firm action."

Again, rings hollow.
Precisely, how Facebook made its money, grew exponentially. ... By
selling and sharing, marketing user data. Still think it doesn't?

"But the remorse coming
out of Silicon Valley isn't just from high-profile leaders like Sandberg
and Zuckerberg. Investors and people who worked to build some of the problematic
technologies are also taking the blame; some are even turning their attention
to fixing the problems."

They're all to blame.
Got filthy rich. Sharing and selling, marketing data. More
to the point and ferociously pointedly? How do you fix the problem
when the horse is already out the barn?

"When Sandy Parakilas
went to work for Facebook in 2011, he says, he deeply believed in its mission
of bringing the world closer together and building community. At the time,
the Arab Spring was in full bloom and social media companies were getting
credit for helping to launch a revolution."

What revolution?
In reality, what they were truly doing was empowering the corporate management
suite and their bought and paid for shills in government to enslave the
work force and the citizenry. How could they have been so achingly
naïve? What planet did they live on? How many of us were
questioning this every step of the way as privacy intrusion exponentially
grew? Did so unchecked. Unquestioned. For the most part,
unaddressed.

"I was extremely excited
about the power of social media to advance democracy all over the world,"
Parakilas says."

Direct opposite occurred.
Regimes grew more repressive, more controlling of Internet access.
So did Google and others who blocked Tor and VPNs in a determined effort
to track, steal data:

"But his optimism would
be tempered by the reality of Facebook's hunger for raw data about its
users. He didn't like the direction it was going. "They have a business
model that is going to push them continuously down a road of deceiving
people," he says. "It's a surveillance advertising business model."
Parakilas says he tried to warn his managers at Facebook that they were
at risk of putting private information into the wrong hands. But the company
was growing fast and making money. Its leaders believed connecting people
was inherently good."

Disingenuous crock of
shit. What they were truly doing was lining their pockets off sale
and sharing of personal data. Marketing private data.

"Many of its earliest
investors believed in its mission too. But now Roger McNamee, who helped
mentor Zuckerberg, says he feels bad about what's happened, "because at
the end of the day these were my friends. I helped them be successful.
I wanted them to be successful."

None of this was thought
through. None of it. Just the bottom line. Ultimate ramifications?
Irrelevant to those supremely concerned with seemingly boundless profit.
Fabulous wealth.

"As part of his penance,
McNamee helped found the Center for Humane Technology. The center is trying
to "realign technology with humanity's best interests." Parakilas has also
joined the effort as an adviser. While Facebook may be in the headlines
now, there is plenty of regret going around Silicon Valley from people
who were part of other companies. Guillaume Chaslot joined Google/YouTube
in 2010. He too started as a true believer. "We could only make things
better if people were more connected," he says. "If everybody could say
what he wanted to say, things would naturally get better." But Chaslot
says he noticed the main goal at YouTube wasn't to inform people; it was
to keep people watching videos for as long as possible. "This goal has
some very bad side effects and I started to notice the side effect as I
worked at YouTube," he says."

This problem has been
an issue for years. Is now only coming to a head?

"Among the side effects
he noticed: People tended to get only one point of view on a topic — and
not always the right one. For example, a search for "moon landing" might
bring up videos from conspiracy theorists arguing that NASA faked the whole
event. Chaslot tried to create an algorithm that would show people
different points of view. But, he says, his bosses weren't interested."

Why would they be?
Forget? 'It's the money, stupid.' Gotten so perverted and ass
backwards our narcissistic nazi president now falsely claims accurate reporting
is 'fake news.' Even Fox News itself, separate from the talking heads,
has now become no more than an infomercial for the Trump nazi and his henchmen.

"A spokesperson from the
company says it has updated its algorithms since Chaslot left. According
to the company, it no longer just tries to keep people on the site for
as long as possible; the goal is to measure through surveys how satisfied
users are with the time they spend on the site."

Jesus Christ. Give
me a break. If what you're saying is indeed true, why do you continue
to block Tor? So you can track? Line your bottomless pockets?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

"Late on Friday, Facebook
made an unexpected announcement: The data firm Cambridge Analytica, hyped
as integral to President Trump’s election, was suspended from the social
network for using data collected improperly from Facebook users."

Much more on this as the
story develops. Reportedly, Mueller is also looking into this.

CBS News reports:

"We're used to operating
through different vehicles in the shadows, and I look forward to building
a very long term and secretive relationship with you." That's what Cambridge
Analytica CEO Alexander Nix told undercover reporters from the U.K.'s Channel
4 News who posed as potential clients over a span of several months. Nix
and two of his colleagues described a variety of underhanded methods they
could use to influence elections, including but not limited to staging,
filming and publishing fake bribery or sex worker stings against opponents,
using former spies to conduct intelligence-gathering on political foes
and various shades of online voter profiling."

Think you haven't been
bamboozled? Fed a steaming shovelful?

"The network aired the
exposé Monday evening -- its reporters spoke with senior members
of the company, including Nix, managing director Mark Turnbull and chief
data officer Dr. Alex Tayler. "The two fundamental human drivers
when it comes to taking information on board effectively are hopes and
fears, and many of those are unspoken and even unconscious -- you didn't
know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction
from you," Turnbull explained in a meeting with a reporter posing as "Ranjan,"
a prospective client from Sri Lanka. He continued, "And our job is
to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to
understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns.
There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually
it's all about emotion."

Think these tactics acceptable
in an American presidential election? Have no problems being manipulated
by a candidate and his/her henchmen?

"Turnbull said the data
firm often digs up damaging information on politicians for its clients
and discreetly pushes the information on the Internet. "We just put
information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then watch it grow,
give it a little push every now and again like a remote control," he said.
"It has to happen without anyone thinking, 'that's propaganda', because
the moment you think, 'That's propaganda', the next question is, 'Who's
put that out?' So we have to be subtle." To hide its involvement,
Turnbull said Cambridge Analytica often uses subcontractors to cover its
tracks. "It may be that we have to contract under a different name -- a
different entity with a different name so that no record exists with our
name attached to it at all," he explained."

No problem with this?
Deception okay? Underhanded tactics appropriate in all American elections?

"The company came under
fire after Facebook suspended the data firm accusing it of violating its
terms of services and storing data extracted from tens of millions of Facebook
profiles. Facebook alleges that users' data was taken without their
permission, but in reality, it was extracted using a loophole in Facebook's
app ecosystem at the time. Cambridge Analytica said a researcher built
an app that provided a personality quiz to Facebook users, but Facebook
claims the researcher then "lied to us" and passed the content onto Cambridge
Analytica. That firm then used the data to build "psychographic profiles"
about voters. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has announced
that her office is launching an investigation into the data usage. Politicians
in both the U.S. and the U.K. are demanding that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
explain how the data theft occurred and how the company plans to protect
consumers."

The Washington Post
reports:

"A British television
station broadcast video Monday apparently showing the head of the data
analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Trump’s 2016
campaign, talking about using bribes, traps involving sex workers and other
unethical tactics to swing elections around the world. The broadcast
by Channel 4 News offered no evidence that such methods were used during
Cambridge Analytica’s work for the Trump campaign, which paid the firm
at least $6 million. But the broadcast sparked a fresh round of questions
about a company already embroiled in controversy about its use of personal
information from tens of millions of Facebooks users — the vast majority
of whom had no idea their names, likes and work histories had been collected
for political purposes."

If Trump and his henchmen
had no intention of using such tactics, why would they have paid this company
$6 million?

CBS News reports:

"Facebook (FB) shares
fell nearly 7 percent Monday amid controversy over how Cambridge Analytica,
which was hired by President Trump's 2016 campaign, was able to harvest
personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users. The 6.8 percent
drop lopped nearly $40 billion off Facebook's market value.
Facebook says it initially gave out the data to a researcher who claimed
it would be used only for academic purposes. Facebook claims the researcher
then "lied to us" and passed the content onto Cambridge Analytica. That
firm then used the data to build "psychographic profiles" about voters.
Investors are worried about the fallout for Facebook from prosecutors,
regulators, and advertisers."

Should be.

"Massachusetts attorney
general Maura Healey wrote on Twitter that her office is launching an investigation
into the data usage. "Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately
from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," Healey wrote. Politicians
in both the U.S. and the U.K. are demanding that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
explain how the data theft occurred and how the company plans to protect
consumers."

Wake up. Facebook
is selling you out.

"Sen. Richard Blumenthal,
D-Connecticut, on Monday urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate
Facebook, in a tweet calling the company's policies to protect consumer
data a "hollow promise." He also urged Congress to examine what he described
as links between Cambridge Analytica and "Russian state interests."

They're lining their pockets.
You're getting royally f--ked. In the ass. Without the KY.
Any questions?

In another article, CBS
News reports:

"Amid the fallout over
the revelation that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, obtained
personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission,
Facebook and some of its executives objected to the use of the phrase "data
breach" to describe the controversy. Nicholas Thompson, a CBS News contributor
and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, said on CBSN on Monday that Facebook
was "very upset" about the use of the word "breach" in a headline in the
British newspaper the Guardian, which first broke the story over the weekend."

A f--king is a f--king
no matter what you call it. No matter how the bullshit gets spun.

"The newspaper has continued
to refer to the incident as a breach in subsequent stories. Their reporting
exposed how Facebook users' data was initially obtained through an app
that collected information on people who took a personality quiz and all
their Facebook friends, supposedly for academic research purposes only.
The data was then provided to Cambridge Analytica, which helped the Trump
campaign during the 2016 Republican primaries."

Don't think you've been
hoodwinked? Worse, don't care?

"Facebook Vice President
Andrew Bosworth defended the company Saturday morning and denied that any
"data breach" took place. "This was unequivocally not a data breach,"
Bosworth said. "People chose to share their data with third party apps
and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements with us/users
it is a violation. no systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information
were stolen or hacked."

The son of a bitch is
so goddamned Aryan arrogant he and his company won't take responsibility.
What does that tell you?

"Reporter April Glaser
with the online magazine Slate posted to Twitter screenshots of tweets
from Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos also taking issue with
the phrase. The tweets appear to have since been deleted from Stamos' page.
"The recent Cambridge Analytica stories by the NY Times and The Guardian
are important and powerful, but it is incorrect to call this a 'breach'
under any reasonable definition of the term," Stamos says in one screenshot.
"We can condemn this behavior while being accurate in our description of
it."

"Here
are @alexstamos now deleted tweets on the app Cambridge Analytica used
to harvest millions of Facebook users' data. pic.twitter.com/jPwRHUyW1w —
april glaser (@aprilaser) March 17, 2018"

Wake up.

CBS News reports:

"The Federal Trade Commission
is investigating whether revelations that data firm Cambridge Analytica
harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users violates a previous
order by the regulatory agency targeting Facebook, according to Bloomberg
News. Under that 2011 agreement, Facebook said it would make changes
to protect its users' privacy, including providing them with "clear and
prominent notice" and asking for their "express consent" before their information
would be shared beyond their privacy settings. "We are aware of the
issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating,"
an FTC spokeswoman told CBS MoneyWatch. "We take any allegations of violations
of our consent decrees very seriously as we did in 2012 in a privacy case
involving Google."

The Washington Post
reports:

"The Federal Trade Commission
has opened an investigation into Facebook following reports that a data
analytics firm that had worked with the Trump campaign had improperly accessed
names, “likes” and other personal information about tens of millions of
the social site’s users without their knowledge. The FTC probe –
confirmed by a source familiar with the agency's thinking and not authorized
to speak on the record -- marks the most substantial political and legal
threat yet to Facebook as it grapples with the fallout from Cambridge Analytica
and its controversial tactics. And it could result in the U.S. government
slapping Facebook with a massive fine."

Not good enough.
Nowhere near.

"At issue for the company
-- and at the heart of the FTC probe -- is a settlement they reached with
the agency in November 2011, ending an investigation that Facebook deceived
users about the privacy protections they are afforded on the site.
Among other requirements, the resulting consent decree mandated that Facebook
must notify users and obtain their permission before data about them is
shared beyond the privacy settings they have established. It also subjected
Facebook to 20 years of privacy checkups to ensure its compliance."

Apparently, not good enough
oversight.

"Recently, though, former
FTC officials have said that Facebook’s entanglement with Cambridge Analytica
may have violated the company's legal agreement with the federal watchdog
agency. Whistleblowers in recent days contend that Cambridge Analytica
collected information about users and their friends under a since-ceased
policy governing third-party apps on Facebook – then kept that data even
after Facebook asked that it be deleted."

Looks like this may turn
out to be quite a legal nightmare for Facebook:

"About 270,000 users downloaded
Cambridge Analytica's app. But the firm was able to obtain personal information
about their friends, who likely had no knowledge that their data was being
collected. Roughly 50 million people may have been affected. If the
FTC ultimately finds that Facebook broke that agreement, it could fine
the company $40,000 for each violation."

NPR reports:

"The British government
says it is seeking a warrant to search databases and servers belonging
to Cambridge Analytica, the London-based company accused of using data
from 50 million Facebook users to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.
U.K. Information Minister Elizabeth Denham had demanded access to Cambridge
Analytica's databases by Monday following reports that the company improperly
mined user data from Facebook to target potential voters. However, after
the firm missed the deadline, Denham told Britain's Channel 4: "I'll be
applying to the court for a warrant."

Think Mueller isn't also
looking into this?

NPR reports:

"Cambridge Analytica has
suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix. The London-based company, which is accused
of using data from 50 million Facebook users to influence the 2016 presidential
campaign, announced the move Tuesday afternoon — one day after the release
of a video that appears to show Nix acknowledging the firm's engagement
in political dirty tricks. "In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix's recent
comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent
the values or operations of the firm," the company's board of directors
said in a statement, "and his suspension reflects the seriousness with
which we view this violation."

NPR reports:

"It's all a far cry from
the beginning of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Cambridge Analytica
waded into American politics with the goal of giving conservatives big
data tools to compete with Democrats. Its big promise: developing detailed
psychological profiles of every American voter, so that campaigns could
tailor their pitches from person to person."

Have no problem being
manipulated?

"We've been appealing
to the same demographic on the same issue," Nix told NPR in February 2016,
"yet how we nuance this engagement is completely different." No,
Cambridge Analytica couldn't fully capture the personality of every single
voter. But here's how Nix pitched the company's approach at the time. Cambridge
Analytica worked with researchers to develop "a 120-question survey that
seeks to probe personality," he said. "And we've rolled this out to literally
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across America."

Think Trump and his henchmen
got their money's worth?

"The company asked all
sorts of questions about personality and behavior. Then it scored people
on traits like openness, extroversion and agreeableness — aspects of the
typical "big five" personality traits. Those results were mixed together
with polls, voter records and online activity in order to create personality
models for voters. Cambridge Analytica may not have talked to you, Nix
said, but "if I talk to enough people who look like you, in terms of what
data they have, I'd be able to quantify your personality based on the discussion
I've had with other people."

No sense of intrusion?
Personal violation?

Gets worse:

"This week, the Times
reported that Cambridge Analytica collected a lot of this information by
breaking Facebook's rules. An outside researcher affiliated with Cambridge
University, Aleksandr Kogan, developed an app for the company that required
users to sign in using their Facebook accounts. Facebook's rules
at the time allowed the app to suck up information about all those users
and, even more importantly, information about their friends. That data
included education, location, the groups and pages they liked, their relationship
status, and where they worked. Kogan, who created the app, was allowed
to collect all this information for academic purposes. What he wasn't allowed
to do was pass the data along to a third party, instead of using it for
research, as had been promised."

Still no sense of violation?
Satisfied with how Facebook protected your personal data?

"All this data went into
the company's much-hyped psychological profiles. While Cambridge Analytica
is now associated with Donald Trump's general election campaign, it was
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who first employed the firm. The Cruz campaign
went all-in on political science theory and big data approaches to campaigning,
and divided voters into six different psychological profiles during the
early primaries. The campaign reached out to voters it grouped as "timid
traditionalists" with different messaging than it did for "temperamental"
voters, even if the calls, emails, and flyers were about the same Cruz
stances on the same topics. The psychological profiling got a lot
of media attention after Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, especially after Nix
publicly claimed credit for the win in a series of media interviews."

"But as the campaign advanced,
the Cruz campaign became skeptical of the approach. It ultimately phased
out the psychological profiling attempts after the South Carolina primary,
even though Cambridge Analytica staffers remained attached to Cruz's campaign."

The question is why.
Certainly, not clear.

"In explicit contractual
language, Cambridge Analytica affirmatively represented that all data used
by them were obtained legally, that they would conduct their operations
'in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations,' and that they
'hold all necessary permits, licenses and consents to conduct its operations,'
" Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said in an emailed statement this
week."

How could they possibly
know for sure? Certainly, not clear.

"Cruz ended his campaign
for president after the Indiana primary. With Cruz out of the race and
Trump on his way to lead the Republican ticket, Cambridge Analytica began
working for the GOP nominee. This shift paralleled the migration of the
Mercer family, major Republican donors with a significant financial stake
in the company."

Fascinating, isn't it?
Quite indicative of the fact those with enormous wealth can usually buy
their way out of any scrape they find themselves in. Until, of course,
the shit finally hits the fan. ... As now seems to be the case.

"While Cruz's campaign
had embraced data science and was willing to experiment with political
science theories that had never before been tested on the presidential
level, the Trump campaign's data operation had been nonexistent. Shortly
after winning the Republican nomination, Trump told the AP he viewed data
as "overrated" in politics. Still, Cambridge Analytica staffers embedded
with Trump digital strategist Brad Parscale in his San Antonio office,
and played a key role in the campaign's online efforts."

Eventually, will likely
become clear who was ultimately responsible for hiring this firm during
the Trump campaign.

"People involved in both
the Cruz and Trump campaigns say they never used the data Cambridge Analytica
illicitly acquired from Facebook. And both campaigns ultimately soured
on both the company and its CEO."

Be interesting to see
if this is indeed confirmed by the Mueller investigation.

CBS News reports:

"Mark Zuckerberg, CEO
of social media giant Facebook (FB), released a statement Wednesday afternoon
breaking his silence about startling reports that the company mishandled
the personal data of millions of users. He wrote in a post on Facebook
that there was a "breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share
their data with us" and said the company "made mistakes" on what he referred
to as the "Cambridge Analytica situation." "We have a responsibility
to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you.
I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure
this doesn't happen again," Zuckerberg wrote."

Too little, much too late.
Same old, same old every time there is a f--kup that sees the light of
day. Wake up. Facebook makes its money marketing your personal
data.

Just the beginning.
Much more to come.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

3-9-18

Equifax fiasco widens.
NPR reports:

"Equifax has disclosed
that an additional 2.4 million people were impacted by a massive cybersecurity
breach last year, bringing the total to about 148 million people.
The credit reporting agency says that the new consumers were identified
during forensic examination of the breach. They were previously unidentified,
the company says, because their social security numbers were not stolen.
Their names and some of their driver's license information was taken, however.
According to the company, "in the vast majority of cases, it did not include
consumers' home addresses, or their respective driver's license states,
dates of issuance, or expiration dates."

Bastards need to be sued.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

"When you open your email
today, consider this: on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments
on a question that didn't exist just a few decades ago — does an email
provider, faced with a search warrant issued in the United States, have
to turn over a customer's email content when that data is stored outside
the U.S.?"

Our nazi government truly
believes its jurisdiction extends across the universe.

"The case, United States
v. Microsoft, involves a federal drug-trafficking investigation in which
law enforcement obtained a warrant for all the data associated with a suspect's
Microsoft account. In response, Microsoft turned over the user's account
identification information that is stored in Redmond, Wash., but refused
to disclose the content of the emails, which were stored in a data center
in Ireland."

Did the right thing.
This goddamned government has no jurisdiction in Ireland.

"Microsoft argues that
an international treaty between the U.S. and Ireland is the only correct
way to obtain the emails, and Ireland agrees. The treaty is known as the
Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty."

This government believes
it can do as it pleases:

"But the U.S. government
argues that process is slow and cumbersome. Furthermore, it would prove
highly problematic with providers such as Google, for example, which breaks
up data and moves it around the world constantly."

Tough shit.

"Siding with Microsoft
in this case are a raft of major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple,
Facebook and Google. They point out that the public did not even have access
to the Internet until 1989 and the "World Wide Web" didn't exist until
1991. Nor were emails stored after they were received. So Congress could
not have intended to cover data that is stored forever in a cloud.
The Supreme Court has established a strong presumption against the extraterritorial
application of a statute unless Congress expresses a clear intent to reach
outside the U.S."

Carefully, consider the
above. Clearly, the Court has bastardized the Constitution in an
effort to grant the Executive Branch power it does not enjoy. Founders?
Spinning in their graves. How is it constitutional for the United
States to extend jurisdiction across the universe?

"The company argues that
allowing the U.S. to reach into foreign territory to retrieve a user's
private emails, even with a warrant, would set a dangerous precedent for
other countries to reciprocate. Disregard for another country's sovereignty
could be seen as an open invitation to the rest of the world to look into
American citizens' private emails, commencing a "global free-for-all."

Wouldn't want to confuse
the nazi idiots on the Court with the truth, would we? LOL.

The Europeans are way
ahead of us on personal privacy issues:

"The U.S. and European
Union demonstrate different priorities when it comes to data protection.
Privacy is enshrined as a fundamental right in Europe. Both the Charter
of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning
of the European Union recognize a "right to the protection of personal
data."

Not so in Nazi America.
The Fourth Amendment has been determinedly bastardized over the decades
to suit the purposes of repressive government.

The following clearly
sums up the debacle:

"In a rare convergence
of opposing ideologies and bitter competitors, Fox News, CNN, the ACLU,
Republican and Democratic senators and congressmen, Apple and Microsoft
agree: The U.S. government should not unilaterally seize data stored in
a foreign country. Doing so, many say, would mark a disregard for the sovereignty
of other nations and infringe on privacy laws that explicitly forbid such
action. The U.S. government, on the other hand, dismisses these concerns,
noting that when served with a warrant, Microsoft could, by tapping a few
keys, transfer the information back to the U.S. from the stored data center
in Ireland, thus avoiding international complications."

Blatant, achingly disingenuous
bullshit. Raw nazism in a goddamned de facto fascist police-state
soon to be transformed to the Trump nazi's Fourth Reich.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

2-16-18

Think Trump and his henchmen
will do anything about this continuing problem? Or, exacerbate it?
CBS News reports:

"The Equifax data breach
exposed more of consumers' personal information than the company first
disclosed last year, according to documents given to lawmakers. The credit
reporting company announced in September that the personal information
of 145.5 million consumers had been compromised in a data breach. It originally
said that the information accessed included names, Social Security numbers,
birth dates, addresses and -- in some cases -- driver's license numbers
and credit card numbers. It also said some consumers' credit card numbers
were among the information exposed, as well as the personal information
from thousands of dispute documents."

Until the public rises
up, demands change, guess what? This shit will continue unabated.

"However, Atlanta-based
Equifax Inc. recently disclosed in a document submitted to the Senate Banking
Committee that a forensic investigation found criminals accessed other
information from company records. According to the document, provided to
The Associated Press by Sen. Elizabeth Warren's office, that included tax
identification numbers, email addresses and phone numbers. Finer details,
such as the expiration dates for credit cards or issuing states for driver's
licenses, were also included in the list."

These assholes don't need
this information. Why do you cooperate with this ongoing f--king?
Cleverly designed to line the pockets of the top 1%.

"Equifax's disclosure,
which it has not made directly to consumers, underscores the depth of detail
the company keeps on individuals that it may have put at risk. And it adds
to the string of missteps the company has made in recovering from the security
debacle. Equifax spokeswoman Meredith Griffanti said that "in
no way did we intend to mislead consumers." The company last year disclosed
only the information that affected the greatest number of consumers and
wanted to "act with the greatest clarity" in terms of the information provided
the committee, she said."

They're lying, corrupt,
abusive, inept sons of bitches. Line their pockets off this shit.
Wake
up. You're being royally f--ked.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-22-17

Think digital assistants
aren't tracking? CBS News reports:

"Digital assistants from
Amazon and Google are listening – possibly even when you think they aren't,
according to a consumer watchdog organization. It studied patent filings
from both companies and found Alexa and her high-tech counterpart Google
Home could start recording more information than you realize they are."

Track. Invade your
privacy to line the corporate bottom line.

"Google and Amazon, the
leading companies that make these devices, say they only record your voice
when you activate them with so-called "wake words." Those recordings are
then transmitted back to Amazon and Google servers, where the questions
are analyzed and answered. While they might work that way for now, some
are worried that could change in the near future."

... If they haven't already
done so:

"They're there to track
you, to surveil you and to sell you," Consumer Watchdog President Jamie
Court said. His advocacy group studied dozens of patent applications for
possible future advances in Google and Amazon's smart home technology.
"What these patents describe is that they're always watching, they're always
listening," Court said."

Consider the following:

"One Amazon patent shows
the company could instruct the Echo device to listen for designated trigger
words, like a discussion of vacation destinations. It could then transcribe
that conversation and use it to try to sell the device's user a related
product."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-22-17

Republican national socialists
in the House continue to take a raucous hard dump on all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties. The Washington Times reports:

"The American Civil Liberties
Union announced opposition Wednesday to the new House bill to extend the
government’s chief foreign intelligence snooping program, saying it doesn’t
do enough to protect Americans’ rights and could lead to new opportunities
for government overreach."

Precisely what 'law and
order' GOP nazis crave.

"The bill would extend
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for four years.
Without an extension, the authority to scoop up communications of foreign
targets would expire at the end of this month. But the ACLU said
more reforms are needed before the powers are renewed, and warned lawmakers
against accepting a bad bill in a deadline deal. “The last decade
has demonstrated time and again that when surveillance laws are negotiated
in secret and rushed through Congress with little debate, it often leads
to abuse and constitutional violations,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative
counsel for the ACLU."

Nothing more than the
hallmark of Republican nazis determined to eviscerate all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties, perversely in the name of 'freedom.' Ersatz
'liberty.'

“Yet House leadership
appears poised to repeat past mistakes and quickly push for a vote on this
hastily drafted legislation without giving members of Congress or the public
time to debate the important privacy interests at stake,” she said."

GOP national socialists
have repeatedly demonstrated they have no regard for privacy. None
at all. Precisely, why they will not rein in their corporate masters.
Remain no more than bought and paid for shills for the corporate management
suite.

"The bill includes some
new limits on the use of Americans’ communications that are snared, but
civil liberties advocates said there are too many loopholes left."

All a ruse. In a
goddamned de facto fascist police-state, soon to be the Trump nazi's Fourth
Reich. ... Right, Sheriff?

Democrats? Absent
without leave. Out to lunch since November 22, 1963.

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

12-8-17

The following is precisely
why you should be using Tor as browser, -- one of many reasons. CBS
News reports:

"A federal lawsuit earlier
filed this week accuses Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress startup,
and a software company named NaviStone of illegally collecting information
from visitors to the Casper website in an attempt to learn their identities.
The 21-page suit, which is seeking class-action status, alleges that New
York City resident Brady Cohen visited the Casper website several times
over the past six months while he was shopping for a new mattress. He didn't
know the company, which has disrupted a $14 billion mattress industry,
was using NaviStone's technology to learn his personally identifiable information
(PII), such as his name and postal address, without his consent. Cohen
wound up not buying a Casper mattress."

Here is how it was apparently
done:

"According to the court
filing, Casper is able to observe the keystrokes, mouse clicks and other
electronic communications and get detailed information on visitors' habits,
thanks to secret NaviStone code embedded in its site, which functions as
an illegal wiretap. The Nov. 28 filing says: "...when connecting
to a website that runs this remote code from NaviStone, a visitor's IP
address and other PII is sent to NaviStone in real-time. This real-time
interception and transmission of visitors' electronic communications begins
as soon as the visitor loads casper.com into their web browser."
The filing added that "The intercepted communications include, among other
things, information typed on forms located on casper.com, regardless of
whether the user completes the form or clicks 'Submit.'"

Use Tor. It's free.
Originally, developed by the U.S. Navy, now updated and improved continually
by the Tor community. Your data is encrypted from your computer through
your ISP and on to three different relays all over the globe before it
is unencrypted, then goes on to and reaches its ultimate destination, making
it difficult to track. Your IP address can appear to be anywhere
in the world. You can change it every time you access a new URL.
-- Don't commit crimes. ... You will ultimately get caught.
Takes an enormous amount of effort and resources, but you will get caught.

--Some websites are blocking
Tor because they want to track, sell your data. If blocked, run Tor
through a free Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Also, along the lines
of privacy, consider the following. NBC News reports:

"It sounds like such a
fun holiday gift idea: a DNA test that can tell your sister-in-law whether
she really has Native American ancestors, or one that promises to craft
your friend a perfect diet based on his genes. Home DNA tests are
likely a big seller for the next few weeks, but privacy experts say consumers
should be cautious, and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said this past weekend
that he was asking the Federal Trade Commission to "take a serious look
at this relatively new kind of service and ensure that these companies
can have clear, fair privacy policies."

Here's precisely why this
is so important:

"The problem is that when
you send away a tube of your spit or a cheek swab, you are giving away
your full genetic code. Every cell on that cheek swab carries the full
sequence of your DNA, including the mutation pattern that makes it uniquely
yours. “It’s the most valuable thing you own,” says Peter Pitts of
the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Legitimate genetic testing companies promise not to sell or give this data
away without consent."

That assurance can mean
little to nothing:

"But usually, a broad
consent is part of the initial contract a consumer makes with a company
when he or she submits the test for analysis. “Obviously, there is
a lot of fine print,” said Mary Freivogel, president of the National Society
of Genetic Counselors. “Any time you do anything and you have a big, long
agreement in front of you, I think so many of us are accustomed to just
clicking ‘agree’.” Even if you do read the whole agreement, which
can go on for pages, you may not understand what you’re giving the company
permission to do, said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and
the Biosciences at Stanford School of Medicine."

That's the problem.

“That analysis shows things
about your health that the company never told you because that is not the
business they are in,” he said. “They are in the genealogy business.”
So here’s some potentially devastating information about your health and
it’s in someone else’s hands, Greely said. “For a non-trivial percentage
of us, there really are scary things in our genomes,” he said. That
information may or may not be useful to someone else. “Maybe you’re
doing it for fun or for laughs or for conversation at the holiday table
but at the end of the day you may have a good time but the company now
can sell that information 100 different ways,” said Pitts. “You don’t
want that information displayed to other people,” he added. “Ultimately
you don’t want an employer to have access to your information.”

Think it can't, or wouldn't
be used against you?

"A 2008 law called the
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act forbids discrimination based
on genetic information and that would include firing someone because they
have a gene that predisposes to an expensive disease. But it would also
be hard to prove an employer did that, said Pitts. Right now, it’s
hard to identify anyone based strictly on their DNA sequence. But as people
enter more and more information into databases, it could become easier.
23andme has an extensive questionnaire about health, lifestyle habits and
preferences and while it allows customers to skip any questions they choose
to, they can be contributing a lot of personal detail with their DNA sample."

Think that couldn't, or
wouldn't be used against you?

"In 2013, a team at the
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research said they figured out the identities
of 50 people from DNA donated anonymously for scientific study using easily
available internet databases. That’s why companies do their best
to strip away personal information from the genetic codes, but anyone who
has been the victim of credit card fraud or identity theft know that anonymizing
data is far from foolproof. “You cannot promise people absolute confidentiality,”
Greely said. “The other side of it is that it’s possible that somebody
will hack into a company database that does contain your information. My
financial information has been hacked three times in two years. All that
stuff is out there.”

A few additional things
to think about:

"People may not want to
help out a company trying to make a profit off their DNA, and may not associate
“scientific research” with enriching a corporate bottom line. And
people may think they are ready to get some interesting news about their
disease risks, until they actually get it. “It has emotional consequences
that go along with it, and family dynamic consequences,” said Freivogel.
“If you have a positive result, you may need to share that with your five
sisters. And are you prepared to do that?”

Installed apps on your
computer or cellphone can be quite a security problem. Consider the
following. CBS News reports:

"Personal data belonging
to over 31 million customers of a popular virtual keyboard app has leaked
online, after the app's developer failed to secure the database's server.
The server is owned by Eitan Fitusi, co-founder of AI.type, a customizable
and personalizable on-screen keyboard, which boasts more than 40 million
users across the world. But the server wasn't protected with a password,
allowing anyone to access the company's database of user records, totaling
more than 577 gigabytes of sensitive data. The database appears to
only contain records on the app's Android users."

Here's the problem, what
you place at risk:

"A large portion of the
records also included the user's phone number and the name of their cell
phone provider, and in some cases their IP address and name of their internet
provider if connected to Wi-Fi. Many records contain specific details of
a user's public Google profile, including email addresses, dates of birth,
genders, and profile photos. We also found several tables of contact
data uploaded from a user's phone. One table listed 10.7 million email
addresses, while another contained 374.6 million phone numbers. It's not
clear for what reason the app uploaded email addresses and phone numbers
of contacts on users' phones. Several tables contained lists of each
app installed on a user's device, such as banking apps and dating apps."

11-24-17

Here is precisely how
Aryan arrogant our traitorous government has become. How achingly
indifferent to all cvil and constitutional rights and liberties.

NPR reports:

"Government agencies that
deal with cybersecurity, like the National Security Agency, have two competing
interests. On the one hand, they want to protect America's online infrastructure
and economy from cyberattacks. On the other hand, government agencies want
to harness tools to attack opponents in cyberspace."

-- At the expense of the
public, all civil and constitutional rights and liberties, which wind up
in the balance ultimately.

"These goals come into
conflict when government agencies discover or buy flaws in software, called
"zero day" exploits, that the software's makers don't know about. The government
can inform the company so the flaw can be patched — or it can save the
secret weakness in order to use it to launch attacks against enemies."

That's when the public
pays the price:

"There's a catch to hoarding
the software flaws though: That same exploit could end up being used against
Americans if hackers discover the flaw on their own."

Not only can this happen,
it
does.

Here's the problem:

"Recent hacks call into
question just how well the government can actually keep its secrets, however.
A hacking group called the Shadow Brokers stole and leaked "sophisticated,
very sensitive, high-end, really weapons-grade computer code" from the
NSA, former NSA General Counsel Matthew Olsen told NPR this week.
"The agency regarded as the world's leader in breaking into adversaries'
computer networks failed to protect its own," as The New York Times recently
described it. "Created at huge expense to American taxpayers, those cyberweapons
have now been picked up by hackers from North Korea to Russia and shot
back at the United States and its allies."

This government has problems
doing anything right. Cannot be trusted. Insult to injury?
Defends withholding security flaws while egregiously unable, unwilling
to protect this information from hackers. Anything wrong with this
picture? Anything at all?

"There's a "tension between
the government's need to sustain the means to pursue rogue actors in cyberspace
through the use of cyber exploits, and its obligation to share its knowledge
of flaws in software and hardware with responsible parties who can ensure
digital infrastructure is upgraded and made stronger in the face of growing
cyber threats," White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Rob Joyce wrote in
announcing the guidelines."

In the clutch, guess who
loses? Wake up. All a ruse.

11-24-17

Expanding on the above,
Republicans are about to succumb to their corporate masters vis a vis net
neutrality. Know what that means? Anyone using the Internet
in this country is in for quite an ass f--king by the corporate management
suite. Without the Vaseline.

The Washington Post
reports:

"Federal regulators unveiled
a plan Tuesday that would give Internet providers broad powers to determine
what websites and online services their customers can see and use, and
at what cost."

Goddamned un-American.
Right Wing nazi. Adolf and Benito? High-fiving on their fiery
perches.

"The move sets the stage
for a crucial vote next month at the Federal Communications Commission
that could reshape the entire digital ecosystem. The FCC’s Republican chairman,
Ajit Pai, has made undoing the government's net neutrality rules one of
his top priorities, and Tuesday's move hands a win to broadband companies
such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Pai is taking aim at regulations
that were approved two years ago under a Democratic presidency and that
sought to make sure all Internet content, whether from big or small companies,
would be treated equally by Internet providers."

Can't have that, can we?
Forget? Top 1% want and need to take it all. Republicans will
certainly do all they can to facilitate it. Where are the Democrats?
Out to lunch since November 22, 1963.

"The decision will be
put to a vote at the agency's Dec. 14 meeting in Washington. It is expected
to pass, with Republicans controlling three of the commission's five seats."

Here's the bottom line
for consumers:

"Relying more heavily
on Internet providers' own promises on net neutrality is a departure from
the current rules, which lay out clear, federal bans against selectively
blocking or slowing websites, as well as speeding up websites that agree
to pay the providers a fee."

Fail to stand up to this
bullshit? Let your voice be known? Get what you richly deserve.
F--ked.

10-20-17

In follow up to earlier
editions here and elsewhere vis a vis Equifax, CBS News reports:

"Indeed, that massive
data breach was possibly one of the worst things that could happen to this
global data-sensitive company. And then last Thursday, some more unpleasant
news emerged: The IRS said it was temporarily suspending its $7.1 million
data security contract with Equifax after malware was detected on some
pages of the credit bureau's website."

Taxpayers and consumers
are indeed double f--ked. Not only by IRS, but one of its corporate
masters. Repeatedly. Ferociously.

Insult to injury?
Get this:

"We believe Equifax's
long-term financial model remains intact," said William A. Warmington,
senior analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, in a recent report to clients.
He said he was reiterating his "outperform" rating on Equifax following
the three-day Congressional testimony by former CEO Richard Smith. "We
expect investor focus to now turn to preliminary 2018 guidance on Equifax's
third-quarter earnings call," he said."

"Warmington noted that
his 2018 estimates were below consensus because many investors expected
2018 to be a "transition year," with revenues and costs predictably affected
by the breach. The challenge to management, he added, is to provide insight
into the breach's impact, such as which costs are transitory versus fixed.
But he reiterated that Equifax's long-term growth model remains viable,
and so he has now introduced above-consensus estimates for 2019 revenue
of $3.77 billion and earnings per share of $6.80."

Warms the cockles of the
heart, doesn't it?

Insult to injury?

"Some analysts believe
the Congressional hearings were a win for Equifax. Afterward, said George
Mihalos, equity analyst at investment firm Cowen, "we see little long-term
risk to Equifax's B2B [business-to-business] business and its role in the
consumer lending ecosystem."

Hear the rumble?
An unwanted dreaded second American revolution catastrophically looming.
... As the revolution doomsday clock strikes ever closer to midnight.

10-13-17

Two outrageously corrupt
abusive corporations got their ass kicked hard figuratively in the Senate
by both Democrats and Republicans recently. NPR reports:

"When corporate chief
executives appear before Congress, they come braced for battle, but hope
for gentle treatment. Tender handling is not what they got on Tuesday.
Not from Republicans. Not from Democrats."

About time. Tough
shit. Doesn't your heart bleed?

"Not when they were representing
Wells Fargo and Equifax — two huge companies that recently have harmed
Americans. "At best, you were incompetent. At worst, you were complicit.
And either way you should be fired," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan."

Not good enough.
Nowhere near. What this son of a bitch and his cronies desperately
need is criminal prosecution. ... Right, Amanda?

"Sloan was testifying
before the Senate Banking Committee, trying to explain the scandals that
continue to plague his company."

"In another hearing at
the same time, the former CEO of Equifax, Richard Smith, was telling a
House Energy and Commerce subcommittee about how his company managed to
expose the sensitive, private information involving more than 145 million
Americans."

This son a bitch and his
cronies also desperately need criminal prosecution:

"The scope of Equifax's
failure to protect people's privacy was "unprecedented," subcommittee chairman
Bob Latta, R-Ohio, said. The breach was "also unique because of the sensitivity
of the information stolen — including full nine-digit Social Security numbers,"
Latta said."

Height of galling hypocrisy?
Get this:

"Smith, who stepped down
last week from Equifax, started by saying: "I'm truly and deeply sorry
for what happened."

Like the Trump nazi, failed
to take personal responsibility:

"He then blamed the massive
breach on two factors: "human error and technology errors." Rep.
Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said Congress should pass legislation to protect
consumers whose personal data gets stolen in such security failures. "Of
course, breaches will continue to occur, but they occur more often when
there is no accountability and when no preventative measures are in place,"
he said."

Precisely, why these pieces
of crap need to be aggressively prosecuted every goddamned time this shit
happens.

"Equifax executives were
notified of the security breach in July, but waited until August to disclose
it. "Consumers do not have any say in whether or not Equifax collects
and shares their data," Pallone said. "And that's what makes this breach
so concerning. This is unlike any other breaches at stores like Target
and Michael's where consumers could make a choice and change their shopping
habits if they were upset with how the companies protected data. That's
simply not the case with Equifax."

No regulation. Do
as they please. Refuse to correct erroneous reports. Since
the government is bought and paid for by its corporate masters, abjectly
refuses to effectively regulate them, credit reporting agencies need to
be abolished. These agencies are no more than a ruse, an unmitigated
fraud.

Regarding Wells Fargo:

"The banking giant, which
is an NPR sponsor, has been in trouble for more than a year – ever since
it revealed that its aggressive sales culture had led to the creation of
millions of potentially fake accounts. Since then, other scandals have
erupted, mostly involving excessive fees."

"Like Smith, Sloan showed
remorse. "I am deeply sorry for letting down our customers and team
members," he said. "I apologize for the damage done to all the people who
work and bank at this important American institution. When the challenges
at Wells Fargo demanded decisive action, the bank's leaders acted too slowly
and too incrementally. That was unacceptable."

You bastards in the corporate
management suite were the goddamned ring leaders. The peasants don't
fart without permission, authorization of their corporate masters.
Yet, you refuse to take responsibility for your crimes, you nazi son of
a bitch? Give me a break.

"But senators thought
it was worse than unacceptable. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Sloan:
"What in God's name were you thinking?" And Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio,
was having none of it. "The changes Mr. Sloan and his team have made are
not sufficient to reform a corporate culture that is willing to abuse its
customers and employees in an effort to pad its numbers and increase executive
compensation," Brown said."

Precisely, why clawbacks,
restitution, and criminal prosecution are desperately needed. While
directly responsible for this outrageous criminal activity, the attitude
of this fascist son of a bitch remains 'hear no evil, see no evil, speak
no evil.' An egregious crock of shit. ... Right, Amanda?

"It's also incredibly
difficult to opt out of the system. You could live an all-cash lifestyle,
never requesting credit from any bank, but still wind up with your information
in the hands of the credit companies through less-obvious sources like
cable or phone companies, property tax bills, or doctors' offices.
Customers like this are known as "thin file" borrowers, because of the
lack of information, but that doesn't stop Equifax, Experian and TransUnion
from building files on you. In these cases, the companies might only have
a name, address, maybe a Social Security number — but that data could still
be enough to start the process of identity theft."

The public has been sold
out. By both major political parties. Bought and paid for.
By their corporate masters. Hear the rumble? An unwanted
dreaded second American revolution catastrophically looming. As the
doomsday revolution clock strikes ever closer to midnight.

Insult to injury?
The Senate remains achingly clueless. NPR reports:

"Former Equifax CEO Richard
Smith, who stepped down just last week, faced a roomful of angry senators
and some tough questions at a hearing Wednesday. It was the second of three
congressional hearings he is testifying in front of this week. Republicans
and Democrats alike are upset about the massive hack of Social Security
numbers and other sensitive information at the consumer credit reporting
company. "This simply is not a company that deserves to be trusted
with Americans' personal data," said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, the Senate
Banking Committee's ranking member. "Your actions have exposed over half
the country's adults to financial harm."

Congress gave these bastards
authority to collect this data. Why? To line your pockets,
Senator? Forget? You bastards are bought and paid for.

"The whole thing is staggering,"
said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. "Equifax and this whole industry should
be completely transformed."

Since Congress is bought
and paid for, refuses to rein in its corporate masters, this entire industry
needs to be outlawed. Remains a public scourge. A threat to
every American.

"Warren, who has already
introduced legislation related to the Equifax breach, told Smith: "When
companies like Equifax mess up, senior executives like you should be held
personally accountable and the company should pay mandatory and severe
financial penalties for every consumer record that is stolen."

These bastards need to
be criminally prosecuted as well.

"One cybersecurity expert
who spoke to NPR said he is getting calls from both Democrats and Republicans
interested in creating new rules for the industry. And at the hearing Wednesday,
Republicans were landing some verbal blows on Smith too."

Too little, much too late.

"Republican John Kennedy
of Louisiana raised a series of questions about Equifax's basic business
model and noted that the company also has a premium data monitoring service
that it charges consumers for. "You can't run your business without me,"
he said. "My data is the product that you sell." So Kennedy said
it seems "incongruent" that Equifax charges people to make sure that the
information it is collecting is accurate. "I mean I don't pay extra in
a restaurant to prevent the waiter from spittin' in my food," the senator
said."

Where have you bought
and paid for bastards in Congress been all these decades this bullshit
has gone on? Congress is directly responsible. Granted them
carte blanche. To line your pockets.

"Warren zeroed in on another
way Equifax makes money. She said Equifax has some of the "worst" cybersecurity
around because it actually has no incentive to protect people's data from
being stolen and used for identity theft."

You know this bullshit
has gone on for decades. Yet, nothing was done since you bastards
in Congress remain bought and paid for.

"Warren said that while
Equifax is offering free "credit monitoring" for a year, after that consumers
will have to pay if they want to keep getting that protection. More than
7 million people have signed up for the free monitoring through Equifax
since the breach, Warren said. "If just 1 million of them buy just
one more year of monitoring through Equifax at the standard rate of $17
a month, that's more than $200 million in revenue for Equifax because of
this breach," she added."

Precisely, why these agencies
need to be put out of business. Cannot be trusted.

"Warren detailed other
ways Equifax is already making more money as a result of the breach. For
example, she said a company called LifeLock has seen a tenfold surge in
enrollment since the breach. According to filings with the Securities and
Exchange Commission, LifeLock purchases credit monitoring services from
Equifax — so more money for LifeLock means more money for Equifax.
"You've got three different ways that Equifax is making millions of dollars
off its own screw-up," Warren said. (LifeLock is among NPR's financial
supporters.)"

Forget? Get this:

"In the days after the
breach, some Equifax executives made money another way — by selling millions
of dollars' worth of the company's stock. Smith said "to the best of my
knowledge" the executives didn't know of the breach at the time of the
stock sales. "These are honorable men," he said. But such explanations
didn't seem to satisfy Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. "This really stinks," he
said. "[T]he bottom line here is you had a hack that you found out about
on [July] 29, you told the FBI about the breach and on that same day some
high-level executives sell $2 million worth of stock."

Yet, no criminal prosecution.

Insult to injury?
Abject obscenity?

"Lawmakers also raised
questions about the compensation Smith stands to get as he retires. "You
leave with your base salary, unvested options and a pension, roughly valued
at $90 million. Help me to understand why that's fair?" Sen. Brian Schatz,
D-Hawaii, asked."

He lines his pockets,
you got f--ked. Any questions?

9-29-17

Highly reminiscent
of Llano County Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards
in black who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge,
do as they please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider
the following. It's appalling. Runs against the grain of everything
our formerly great country once stood for. No longer. Clearly,
credit reporting agencies are no better than the SS criminal jackbooted
bastards in black, right, Sheriff?

The Washington Post
reports:

"Equifax traces its roots
to 1899, when two Atlanta grocery store owners, Cator and Guy Woolford,
started what was then known as Retail Credit Co. by going door-to-door
to collect information about people in their community. Their $25 book,
“The Merchant’s Guide,” noted who in the neighborhood typically paid promptly
or who shouldn’t be trusted with credit."

Think anything has basically
changed in all these years regarding the efficacy, accuracy, etc., of these
equally jackbooted bastards in the credit reporting industry? Wake
up. You've been bamboozled. Bought their crock of shit.

"Over time, credit bureaus,
such as Retail Credit, would often align themselves with law enforcement,
Lauer said. Some had desks set aside in their offices for the Internal
Revenue Service or Federal Bureau of Investigation, he said. “There was
no firewall, no protection for consumers at all.”

A continuing problem as
these outrageously abusive jackbooted corporate nazis remain out of control
to this very day. Remain virtually unregulated, courtesy of their
bought and paid for minions in both major political parties.

"By the late 1960s, the
country’s thousands of credit bureaus were under scrutiny by Congress.
The public was beginning to become aware of the massive amounts of data
they housed, and many questioned the accuracy of the information."

"Retail Credit drew particular
scrutiny because of its history of working with health and life insurance
companies. When building reports about whether someone should be extended
policies, the company would collect information from neighbors and family
members about that person’s health, reputation, and sometimes note if they
were homosexual, Lauer said. “Credit worthiness was tied to character,”
he said."

Greatest irony of all?
The corporate management suite ubiquitously has no character. None
at all. By definition since bottom line remains prime directive,
prime mover of all corporate activity. Lie like hell with impunity.
No criminal culpability. Most egregious example covered in this publication
all these years since launch in 1999? Wells Fargo.

"After a series of congressional
hearings, lawmakers adopted the Fair Credit Reporting Act, giving consumers
access to their reports for the first time and requiring the companies
to change incorrect data."

The law has no teeth.
Is not enforced. Certainly, was not when this writer was injured
in a fire some 15 years ago.

"But even after the legislation,
Retail Credit continued to see itself portrayed as a villain on Capitol
Hill and in the media. In 1974, four former employees of the company told
a Senate subcommittee that they were forced to falsify credit reports and
meet unrealistic goals to keep their jobs, including ensuring there was
adverse information about 6 percent to 10 percent of consumers to prove
to their business customers that they were being thorough."

Think anything has changed?
Wake
up.

"That same year, a woman
sued for invasion of privacy after her auto insurance company canceled
her policy because Retail Credit reported that she was living with a man
“without benefit of wedlock.” In 1975, in the wake of the controversy,
the company changed its name to Equifax. The change was to “better portray
a company in the ‘equitable’ distribution of facts,” according to a company
statement."

No more than a crock of
shit. Not just with Equifax, however, but all these goddamned corrupt,
abusive, lying credit reporting agencies. Nothing has changed
for the better. Gotten worse.

"More than 40 years later,
Equifax is one of the world’s largest data providers. Instead of simply
selling credit reports to the business community, it has branched into
new markets, using artificial intelligence, machine learning and other
tactics to unearth information, even sweeping up Facebook and Twitter data
on consumers to help companies decide whom to lend money to."

Worse than that, it shares
personal information with employers, landlords, and many, many others who
do not lend money. Remains a scourge that must be reined in:

“We manage massive amounts
of unique data, we have data on approaching a billion people. We have data
on approaching 100 million companies around the world. The data assets
are so large, so unique,” Richard Smith, the company’s longtime chief executive,
said in speech at the University of Georgia business school in August.
“You think about the largest library in the world ... the Library of Congress,
we manage almost 1,200 times that amount of content every day, around the
world.”

The Aryan arrogance of
this nazi CEO remains unbridled:

"Smith “has done a lot
of great things with Equifax. He took the company and made it the leader
it is today,” said Snyder of CFRA Research. That has included collecting
a lot more data on people. Early in his tenure, Smith made a risky bet
to jump into a new market, buying Talx, which housed the world’s largest
repository of employment data. “Every time an employee was paid,
it creates 50 data attributes,” including how much a person earns and how
much was comprised of a bonus, Smith said in an August talk. The company
could combine that information with data it already had on customers to
create new products, he said. Equifax looked at the billions pieces
of information it was collecting and decided it could use it to make money
in other ways, Snyder said. “They said, hey, we have all this great data
on consumers, how else can we slice and dice it and make more money from
the data we already have?”

They do this at your
expense. To say nothing of your egregious loss of privacy.
Galling insult to appalling injury? Get this:

"As part of its expansion
— the company creates 50 to 75 products a year — Equifax also pitches itself
to companies concerned about becoming the victim of a data breach, offering
the services of the Equifax Data Breach Response Team. “In addition
to extensive experience, Equifax has the most comprehensive set of identity
theft products and customer service coverage in the market,” the company
says on its website. “You’ll feel safer with Equifax.”

Having just suffered one
of the most catastrophic losses of personal data to hackers in history,
what
does this tell you?Wake up. They lined their pockets.
You got f--ked. Any questions? Still don't get it? Get
this:

"Those ambitions may be
derailed by the company’s handling of a massive data breach that exposed
to sensitive information of millions of people. On Sept. 7, Equifax announced
that hackers had gained access to the sensitive personal data — Social
Security numbers, birth dates and home addresses — for up to 143 million
Americans by exploiting a “website application vulnerability.”

CBS News reports:

"San Francisco on Tuesday
became the first U.S. city to sue sue Equifax (EFX) over a massive data
breach that exposed the personal information of about 143 million Americans.
The city filed a lawsuit against the credit reporting company in a California
court. It accuses Equifax of violating state law by failing to implement
reasonable security measures and not providing timely notice of the breach.
The suit seeks tens of millions of dollars in civil penalties and restitution
for some consumers. Equifax declined to comment on the pending litigation,
but says it remains focused on helping its customers."

Think so?

"The state of Massachusetts
has also sued Equifax over the breach, and the company is facing scrutiny
from Congress. San Francisco's lawsuit was filed on the same
day that Equifax chief executive Richard Smith stepped down effective immediately."

Who'd 'a 'thunk' it?

"The executive's exit
is unlikely to turn down the heat on the company, with Smith still scheduled
to appear before House and Senate lawmakers next week to answer question
about the breach."

You think?

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

9-22-17

In follow up to the last
edition, two Equifax officials 'retired,' apparently bailed courtesy of
a golden parachute financed by egregiously f--ked consumers. CBS
News reports:

"Equifax (EFX) says its
chief information officer and chief security officer are leaving the company,
following the enormous breach of 143 million Americans' personal information.
The credit data company said Friday that Susan Mauldin, who had been the
top security officer, and David Webb, the chief technology officer, are
retiring from Equifax immediately. Mauldin, a college music major, had
come under media scrutiny for her qualifications in security. Equifax did
not say in its statement what retirement packages the executives would
receive."

What they desperately
need is immediate vigorous criminal investigation, then prosecution as
warranted.

NPR reports:

"After the revelation
that a cybersecurity breach at the international credit reporting agency
Equifax exposed personal information of 143 million people, the company
has confirmed an additional security incident with a payroll-related service
in the months prior. It says the two are unrelated."

9-22-17

Highly reminiscent
of Llano County Sheriff Bill Blackburn and his criminal SS jackbooted bastards
in black who continue to egregiously disgrace themselves and the badge,
do as they please regardless of the law and Constitution, carefully consider
the following:

"For those concerned about
what happens if law enforcement uses your biometric data to unlock your
phone, according to a Supreme Court ruling, they cannot go through it without
a search warrant."

The hell they can't or
won't. Do as they please, right, Sheriff? The Constitution
means shit squat to the SS criminal jackbooted bastards in black, right,
Bill? All devices must remain password protected, better yet, highly
encrypted.

"If you're still nervous,
you always have the option of switching off the facial recognition and
simply punching in a security code."

Cowardly fail to financially
and/or materially support those fighting for all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties at great personal cost and risk? Get what you
truly deserve.

9-15-17

Think we don't live in
a goddamned fascist police-state? Wake up. The Washington
Times reports:

"The American Civil Liberties
Union filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday challenging the government’s
policy permitting searching cellphones of travelers entering the U.S.,
calling it a violation of privacy rights."

No probable cause.
No warrant.

"The ACLU filed on behalf
of 11 people who had their electronic devices searched without probable
cause. In four cases, the government kept the plaintiffs’ cellphones for
weeks or even months, the lawsuit says."

No probable cause.
No warrant. A goddamned fascist police-state.

"The lawsuit comes at
a time when Homeland Security is stepping up border searches, but has struggled
to explain exactly what officers are looking for. Only a tiny fraction
of travelers — less than a hundredth of one percent — actually face a search,
but the numbers have been growing, reaching a rate of 82 searches a day
as of earlier this year — more than three times the rate in 2015."

These goddamned criminal
jackbooted bastards are on an egregiously unconstitutional fishing trip.

No probable cause.
No warrant. No more than goddamned jackbooted liars.

"But CBP has been unable
to say how many terrorist plots have been disrupted by the searches."

Because they're liars.
Have
absolutely no regard for all civil and constitutional rights and liberties.
Remain
in the mold of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini.

"The ACLU, in the new
lawsuit, said the searches mark a major breach of faith with privacy protections."

Egregious violation
of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments at the very least.

“The volume and detail
of personal data contained on these devices provides a comprehensive picture
of travelers’ private lives, making mobile electronic devices unlike luggage
or other items that travelers bring across the border,” the lawsuit said."

Doesn't matter to jackbooted
nazi government.

"CBP and another immigration
agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — both part of Homeland
Security — have policies allowing border searches of electronic devices
without first needing to obtain a warrant or demonstrate probable cause."

Outrageously unconstitutional
breech by Congress that supposedly allows this bullshit by statute.

"In most cases the search
is instantaneous, but sometimes officers will hold the device — which can
be a smart phone, laptop, tablet or other electronic storage medium — to
do a more thorough check."

No probable cause.
No warrant. Nazi America. A fascist police-state soon
to be the Trump nazi's Fourth Reich. As repeatedly stated
in this publication, no foreign power, no terrorist organization, not even
the criminal element present a greater threat to life, liberty, all civil
and constitutional rights and liberties than this government, all levels
and branches, -- and its criminal jackbooted bastards in blue.

9-15-17

An achingly gutless public,
willing to put up with the intolerable, always gets what it truly deserves.
NPR reports:

"Equifax, an international
credit reporting agency, has announced that a cybersecurity breach exposed
the personal information of 143 million U.S. consumers. In a statement
released Thursday, the Atlanta-based agency acknowledged that "criminals
exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain
files." Those files include data such as Social Security numbers,
birthdates and addresses — and, Equifax adds, "in some instances, driver's
license numbers."

Why do you compliantly
provide these bastards this information? Why do you stupidly subject
yourselves to this ongoing bullshit? Where is your rugged individualism
so disingenuously, falsely championed by Republicans?

"For a span of roughly
two months — from mid-May through July 29, when Equifax says it uncovered
the breach — hackers had access to this information, as well as the credit
card numbers of about 209,000 consumers and "certain dispute documents
with personal identifying information" of about 182,000. All told,
the number of American consumers affected constitutes about 44 percent
of the U.S. population. Equifax did not explain why more than two
months passed before it discovered the hack, which also affected an unspecified
number of consumers from Canada and the U.K."

NPR reports:

"Three executives of the
credit-reporting agency Equifax sold nearly $2 million worth of company
stock within days of a massive data breach potentially affecting 143 million
Americans — one that wasn't publicly disclosed until more than a month
later."

When will the hopelessly
corrupt bastards in the corporate management suite be criminally prosecuted
for their crimes instead of being protected, coddled by their bought and
paid for government lackeys?

"In a statement, Equifax
says the executives "had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at
the time they sold their shares."

Not credible. If,
in fact, they had no knowledge, are egregiously unfit for the jobs they
hold.

"Equifax revealed the
security breach late Thursday. On Friday, its stock price went sliding
by double digits as millions of Americans struggled to get answers from
the company about whether they were affected and what to do next. New York
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has opened an investigation into the
hack."

Not good enough.
Same old goddamned bullshit. Nothing ever changes. Designedly.
Why would it? The bastards in government, at all levels and branches,
remain bought and paid for.

"The credit reporting
company has said that it discovered "unauthorized access" to its systems
on July 29. The intrusion potentially jeopardized sensitive details including
names, birthdates, Social Security and driver's license numbers. The hackers
also stole credit card numbers for 209,000 consumers."

The gutless citizenry
is the problem. Put up with this bullshit to get a loan, credit card,
an apartment? Get what you richly deserve. Why ever agree to
share this information with these unprincipled, outrageously corrupt, abusive,
inept pieces of shit? Where's your self-reliance, rugged individualism
supposedly championed by Republican Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged nazis?

"Regulatory filings show
the three Equifax executives — Chief Financial Officer John Gamble, U.S.
Information Solutions President Joseph Loughran and Workforce Solutions
President Rodolfo Ploder — completed stock sales on Aug. 1 and 2.
Bloomberg, which first located the filings, reports that "none of the filings
lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 scheduled trading plans."

Put up with this shit?
Fail to courageously stand up? Remain part of the ongoing problem.

Initial response from
Equifax was appalling:

"In order to learn whether
a specific user's information is breached, the website asks people to type
in a name and the last six digits of a Social Security number — "the kind
of information they're often warned not to reveal online," as Bloomberg
notes. Once users get through, the website doesn't automatically
enroll them in TrustedID credit monitoring — instead, the site issues a
date, about a week in the future, when the user would have to return to
complete the enrollment. Equifax also drew fire for the several restrictive
clauses it included in the legal terms that applied to its customer-help
website and the free credit-monitoring service. Users and experts
had started pointing out that the company was imposing a so-called arbitration
clause on the users, which essentially restricted their right to sue the
company or be part of a class action in the future."

Think the following credible?
Get this:

"After pressure from consumer
advocates and New York's attorney general, Equifax on Friday afternoon
added a new line to its FAQ section: "The arbitration clause and class
action wavier included in the TrustedID Premier Terms of Use applies to
the free credit file monitoring and identity theft protection products,
and not the cybersecurity incident." On its face, this line might
suggest that Equifax would not restrict people's ability to hold the company
legally accountable for potential damages specifically from the data breach.
"But when rubber meets the road," Rheingold says, "we'll see."

F--k these assholes.
Stand up. Refuse to hand over personal information they don't need,
won't protect. Forget? They get theirs, you get f--ked.
The
American Way.

This breach may be far
worse than these assholes are owning up to. Wake up. The
Washington Post reports:

"But before people can
sign up and find out whether their personal information was compromised,
consumers are prompted to enter their last name and the last six digits
of their Social Security number. “This is very unusual — most security
systems are hard-wired only to reveal the last four digits of an SSN for
identification purposes,” said Satya Gupta, co-founder & chief technology
officer at Virsec Systems, a cybersecurity firm. “This strongly implies
that the typical four digits may have been compromised, and they need additional,
previously ‘secret’ information to positively identify customers. This
reinforces the conundrum of these breaches — with more information exposed,
how do you now prove a person’s identity?” Equifax did not immediately
respond to queries about why its website asks for such information."

Wake up.
You're being f--ked. Sold a bill of goods.

Some are smartening up:

"On Twitter, many expressed
their exasperation with Equifax's approach. Others took a sarcastic route.

"I
can't believe that @Equifax has the audacity to ask for 2/3rds of your
SSN and your last name to verify if you're part of the data breach

— Anita
Knapp (@GayRobot_) September 7, 2017

"If
you're worried about your personal data being breached due to Equifax hacking,
then send me your name & social security # so I can check

— Sam
Z Comedy (@SamZComedy) September 7, 2017"

No excuse.
Gets worse:

“Right now, the wound
is raw,” said Jeff Kagan, a Georgia-based telecommunications industry analyst.
“For Equifax to pour more salt on that wound today by asking to put your
information on another website that they promise will be secure doesn’t
make sense. Why Equifax doesn’t understand this before it put up this website
raises another question — it’s a big, embarrassing mistake.” Several
people who took the leap and submitted their information to Equifax said
on Twitter and elsewhere that after signing up, Equifax did not disclose
whether their personal data was impacted by the massive breach. Instead
they received an enrollment date for the credit monitoring program."

You're being shamelessly
bamboozled. F--ked.

"Equifax also said that
the credit card numbers of about 209,000 U.S. consumers, and credit dispute
documents of roughly 182,000 U.S. consumers, were also accessed by hackers.
The company will be mailing out notices to those individuals, but it will
not be contacting everyone who was affected in the data breach."

Time for these criminal
pieces of shit in the corporate management suite to be aggressively prosecuted,
convicted, do serious prison time. ... And not in a 'country club'
for white collar criminals.

CBS News reports:

"Equifax revealed Thursday
that hackers earlier this year stole personal information on as many as
143 million Americans. The company keeps track of the credit ratings
of American consumers, which means its database is a massive treasure trove
of personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers
and addresses. "This is basically the Irma of data breaches. It's
a 10 on a scale of one to 10," said cybersecurity analyst Avivah Litan.
For the hackers it's like finding a gold mine. "They can take out
a mortgage, they can file tax refunds, they can file for Social Security
benefits, you name it. They can take all your benefits away," Litan said.
She says consumers "need to be hyper vigilant and monitor their accounts."

The bastards at Equifax
need to be aggressively prosecuted.

CBS News reports in another
post:

"When a company tries
to fix a security breach, it's never a good sign when consumers feel less
secure because of its remedies."

This corporation and the
others couldn't care less.

"That's the fix Equifax
(EFX) finds itself in after bungling its response to its massive breach,
which is fueling consumer outrage and calls for greater regulation over
credit-reporting agencies, which include Experian (EXPGY) and TransUnion
(TRU). Four days after Equifax said 143 million Americans had been affected
by the breach, many consumers remain confused about whether their data
was stolen and how to protect themselves."

This company continues
to stonewall.

"A site created by Equifax
where consumers can check whether their data was stolen asks them to enter
their last names and the last 6 digits of their Social Security numbers.
But the site provides responses even for bogus names and numbers (such
as "Trump" and "123456"), leading to questions about its accuracy."

Still think you should
provide these bastards your personal information? Trust them?

"Consumer advocates pointed
out that Equifax's terms of use for the credit-monitoring service it's
offering free for one year required the breach victims to sign away their
legal rights. On Monday, the company said it had backed away from that
requirement."

Did it? Truly, do
so?

"Some consumers said Equifax
needs to take more steps to make amends, such as offering free credit monitoring
services for several years or longer, not just one year. The hackers stole
Social Security numbers, which have no expiration date."

What consumers need to
do is stop providing these assholes personal information they don't need,
won't protect. Just handsomely profit from.

"You need to take more
action," one consumer wrote on Twitter to Equifax. "Free credit freezes
for those affected. Lifetime credit monitoring. Reimbursement for all other
freezes."

It's all about looting
the public it certainly does not serve, only the corporate management suite:

"Security experts are
recommending consumers whose data was stolen place credit freezes on their
accounts. That restricts access to your credit information, which makes
it more difficult for hackers to open accounts in your name. But
credit freezes aren't free: They typically cost between $5 to $10 each.
It's important to place freezes at the major credit-reporting bureaus in
order to halt scammers, which means consumers may need to shell out up
to $30 for the service. "Will we be reimbursed for having to pay
for credit freezes?" one consumer wrote to Equifax on Twitter "I did 4
over the weekend, I do not think that I should have to pay for it!"

"Adding to the frustration
was the news that three Equifax senior executives, including its chief
financial officer, sold $1.8 million worth of company stock just days after
the company discovered the breach but weeks before it was made public.
That stock sale, plus the company's response that has been roundly criticized
as inadequate and questions about why Equifax delayed informing the public
about the breach for several weeks are creating a perfect storm of controversy.
Chief among the questions lawmakers and consumer regulators are raising
is whether the credit-reporting bureaus are subject to enough oversight."

They need to be put out
of business. Serve only themselves and their corporate masters.
Not the public. Quite the opposite.

"The bureaus store sensitive
financial data on about 200 million Americans, which the companies provide
to banks and other financial institutions that need to check into consumers'
creditworthiness. Employers, landlords and utilities also use the bureaus'
data to check up on consumers."

It's an abusive invasion
of privacy. Used to discriminate. None of the business of an
employer, landlord, utility, etc.., -- anyone other than a money lender.
Any utility, landlord, etc., can and does charge a deposit. Outrageous
abuse of authority unbecoming a democratic republic. The people are
gutless sheep. Will put up with nearly anything.

"While their services
are essential to the U.S. economy, the credit-reporting bureaus don't have
the same regulatory oversight as the financial industry."

"Essential" only to the
corporate management suite. What oversight? Do as they please.
With impunity. While the public continues to get royally f--ked.

"Before Equifax announced
the breach, some lawmakers last week were considering whether to lower
penalties for credit-reporting bureaus whose inaccurate information hurts
consumers, according to The Wall Street Journal. Equifax's initial
offer for free credit-monitoring services required consumers to agree to
mandatory arbitration, a tactic that's a favorite of the financial industry
because consumers give up their rights to join class actions. Arbitration
is slated to be barred in the financial industry next year by the Consumer
Finance Protection Bureau, but Republicans have sought to reverse that
ruling."

Nazi Republicans remain
at the heart of the problem. Their pockets are being lined.
Their corporate masters always come first. Not that Democrats are
any better, but the GOP is indeed leading the charge to f--k consumers.

9-1-17

Our nazi government continues
to remain on a fishing expedition. CBS News reports:

"A D.C. Superior Court
judge on Thursday ruled in favor of the Department of Justice's ability
to exercise a search warrant for data related to an anti-Trump website
the DOJ believes is connected to plans for violent Inauguration Day riots."

This son of a bitch on
the bench has violated his falsely sworn oath of office to protect and
defend the United States Constitution. No more than a bought and
paid for Republican nazi shill.

"The Justice Department
had originally sought a slew of records related to the website Disruptj20.com
from its website hosting company, DreamHost, including HTTP visitor logs
that would reveal IP addresses for all of the website's visitors. But DreamHost
objected to the Justice Department's request and said it could reveal 1.3
million visitors' identities. The DOJ earlier this week said that it was
revising its warrant to include a date range on material it requested,
to exclude all visitor logs and the website's draft blog posts that were
never published. Chief Judge Robert E. Morin granted that revised request
Thursday, although DreamHost fears the DOJ will still access some IP addresses
given that it will still be able to access emails related to Inauguration
Day protests."

No more than an orchestrated
fishing expedition facilitated by a nazi 'judge.'

"The DOJ believes Disruptj20.com
could reveal plans that led to protests that turned violent when President
Trump took office. Authorities have charged more than 200 people with felony
rioting or destruction of property in connection to Inauguration Day."

This is no more than a
fishing expedition that will draw innocent people into its achingly pernicious
net. To protect yourself against this bullshit use Tor browser.
Run Tor through a VPN if blocked.

"The court will supervise
the warrant's implementation, although it won't be executed immediately
if DreamHost files an appeal. Attorneys for the website hosting company
told reporters Thursday they are considering an appeal. DreamHost
maintains that the government's revised request is still too broad and
unconstitutional, citing Fourth Amendment concerns. The judge acknowledged
the free speech concerns surrounding the request, and said he sought to
seek a balance between law enforcement and constitutional rights."

Goddamned bullshit.
A lie. By a bought and paid for 'judge.'

"The case has concerned
privacy advocates who fear the government is encroaching on both First
Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights, and related expectations of privacy.
The government's original request for IP address-revealing visitor logs
would have encompassed anyone who visited the website, including people
who stumbled upon the site or visited for academic or journalistic reasons.
One defendant, Raymond Aghaian, compared the government's request to using
a warrant to search and seize all rooms in an apartment building."

Out of control nazi government.
No foreign power, no terrorist organization, not even the criminal element
present a greater threat to life, liberty, all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties than all branches and levels of nazi government and
their jackbooted bastards in blue.

9-1-17

The insurance cartel couldn't
care less about client privacy. If it did, think the following could
have occurred? CNN reports:

"The health care company
Aetna mailed envelopes that revealed the HIV status of some of its customers
in multiple states, according to the Legal Action Center and the AIDS Law
Project of Pennsylvania."

Think there weren't catastrophic
consequences?

"The legal organizations
and six other organizations are representing the customers, a group of
whom are devastated after friends and neighbors saw the envelopes and learned
of their status, the firms said in a news release. Attorneys sent a demand
letter to Aetna on Thursday on behalf of those affected, calling on the
company to stop sending letters in this format and develop a plan to change
its practices."

"Aetna said the letters
went to about 12,000 customers; the law firms say they have received 23
complaints, with more coming in. According to the law organizations'
release, Aetna's letters included instructions for filling prescriptions
and were sent to customers who were taking HIV medications as well as pre-exposure
prophylaxis or PrEP, a pill that helps prevent a person from getting HIV.
This information was clearly visible through a window on the envelopes."

No problem? Wake
up:

"I know of someone who
has been kicked out of his home because somebody who saw his envelope learned
his HIV status," said Sally Friedman, legal director of the Legal Action
Center, who is coordinating the efforts of attorneys alongside Ronda B.
Goldfein, executive director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania."

How about losing a job?
Worse?

"People with HIV need
to feel they can seek medical help without their private information being
illegally shared with neighbors, family, etc," Friedman said. "So when
an insurance company breaches confidentiality in this fashion, it can deter
people from getting health care."

"The letters were mailed
July 28, and on July 31, Aetna was made aware that its customers' personal
information was revealed, according to a letter the company sent to affected
customers this week explaining the situation. Aetna determined August
2 that the vendor that handled the mail used a windowed envelope, and in
some cases the paper inside may have shifted to make personal health information
viewable, the letter said."

Why is this information
sent, period? To what end? What for? Sue the living shit
out of the hopelessly clueless bastards.

"Shelly Brisbin, Texas
Standard’s web editor and author of over a dozen tech books, says the government
is challenging the boundaries of privacy when it comes to cell phone data
and internet activity. Verizon, along with Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and
other tech giants have filed an amicus brief in a case where the government
requested cell phone data for the suspect in a series of robberies. The
Supreme Court will hear that case this fall. The companies are reluctant
to hand over customer data, and are also hampered by the lack of clarity
in the law around data privacy."

The true problem here
is the unwillingness of companies to stand up to this nazi government.

"The Department of Justice
also requested a large amount of data from web hosting provider DreamHost,
including 1.3 million IP addresses, contact information and forms filled
out by visitors to one of its websites that helped organize protests around
President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s unclear why the government
has requested such a large volume of information, and DreamHost is fighting
the subpoena."

The way to protect yourself
is to use Tor browser. It's free. When blocked, run Tor through
a VPN.

Here is the take of NPR:

"Some VPNs promise anonymous
browsing for free or just a few dollars a month; they claim not to share
your data. But these services don't always deliver on their promises.
"If you're not careful with choosing your VPN service provider, the medicine
might be worse than the illness," says Nick Feamster, a computer science
professor at Princeton University. He says tens of millions of people have
downloaded VPNs — and many don't realize they're not as secure as they
claim. In the first major review of VPN providers, researchers from
across the globe tested nearly 300 free VPN apps on Google Play. What they
found was alarming. Nearly 40 percent injected malware or malvertising.
And nearly 20 percent of the apps didn't even encrypt user traffic.
This month, the Center for Democracy & Technology filed a complaint
with the Federal Trade Commission alleging the VPN Hotspot Shield collects
data and intercepts traffic. If true, that would be a direct violation
of claims by the company's policy to "never log or store user data."
Amid all the VPN angst, the app TunnelBear is fighting for its reputation.
To verify it is committed to protecting user security, the company became
the first in the industry to complete a third-party audit. Feamster,
with Princeton, says that's very encouraging — even though the most recent
audit turned up some vulnerabilities. Experts say the safest option
is to set up your own VPN server and connect to it, or use Tor to browse
the Web anonymously. But Feamster admits most people won't do that."

That's clearly a mistake.
Run Tor. Do it through a VPN when blocked by a website. Wake
up. Even if the VPN is not up to par, Tor is. Running Tor
through a VPN when blocked will provide security as well as overcome being
blocked. Best defense against our nazi government and its corporate
masters.

8-4-17

Think your smart phone
secure? CBS/CNET reports:

"Cheap phones are coming
at the price of your privacy, security analysts discovered. At $60,
the Blu R1 HD is the top-selling phone on Amazon. Last November, researchers
caught it secretly sending private data to China. Shanghai Adups
Technology, the group behind the spying software on the Blu R1 HD, called
it a mistake. But analysts at Kryptowire found the software provider is
still making the same "mistake" on other phones."

No concern?

"Kryptowire looked at
more than 20 pieces of firmware from low-end Android devices, all which
had vulnerabilities that allowed for spyware apps and all of which had
a MediaTek chipset. The chipset always came with a preinstalled app called
MTKLogger, which allowed for surveillance of data like your browsing history
and GPS location if it were hijacked. MediaTek said it resolved the
issue in November, but researchers at Kryptowire found out last week that
the Blu Advance 5.0 still ships with a vulnerable version of the app. The
phone, which is the third best-selling phone on Amazon, does not have a
firmware update available to stop a potential exploit, Johnson said."

This problem has also
been found on other less popular phones sold.

7-28-17

Big Brother is here.
Alive and well. NPR reports:

"A Wisconsin company is
offering to implant tiny radio-frequency chips in its employees – and it
says they are lining up for the technology."

Indeed, a sucker is
born every day.

"The idea is a controversial
one, confronting issues at the intersection of ethics and technology by
essentially turning bodies into bar codes. Three Square Market, also called
32M, says it is the first U.S. company to provide the technology to its
employees."

Aren't they 'lucky?'
Human chattel owned by their corporate masters.'
"The company manufactures
self-service "micro markets" for office break rooms. It said in a press
release that obtaining a chip is optional, but expects that about 50 employees
will take part."

Won't be optional for
long. Called control. Ownership. Human chattel.

"Employees who have the
rice-grain-sized RFID chip implanted between their thumb and forefinger
can then use it "to make purchases in their break room micro market, open
doors, login to computers, use the copy machine," 32M said. CEO Todd
Westby said that the company believes the technology will soon be ubiquitous:

"We
foresee the use of RFID technology to drive everything from making purchases
in our office break room market, opening doors, use of copy machines, logging
into our office computers, unlocking phones, sharing business cards, storing
medical/health information, and used as payment at other RFID terminals.
Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use
this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc."

Why not? They
already own their sheep. Precisely, why you willingly, compliantly
bare your ass for corporate inspection by the company doctor. Piss
in a bottle under corporate supervision. You're owned. Bought
and paid for. For a compensation package that keeps you purposefully
indentured servants. Nazi America.

"The company is immediately
facing questions about safety and privacy – for example, whether the technology
could be used in invasive ways, like tracing employee whereabouts and monitoring
the length of breaks."

Just the beginning.

"The chip is not trackable
and only contains information you choose to associate with it," the company
said in a Q and A. "This chip does not have GPS capabilities." It added
that the device has been FDA-approved for some 13 years."

First iteration.
Think the next generations won't track, record and upload physiological
data, parameters, etc.. The sky's the limit for Big Brother.

"The employees themselves
appear to be responding positively. For example, software engineer Sam
Bengtson told The New York Times that "it was pretty much 100 percent yes
right from the get-go for me. ...In the next five to 10 years, this is
going to be something that isn't scoffed at so much, or is more normal.
So I like to jump on the bandwagon with these kind of things early, just
to say that I have it."

"The American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) announced Wednesday that it is suing the Justice Department
to obtain more information about one of the government's surveillance programs.
The government only has to tell individuals that it has been spying on
them under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if
the evidence gathered is being used in a criminal trial or legal proceeding,
the ACLU pointed out in a press release about the lawsuit."

This is a convenient Catch-22
for nazi government:

"The vast majority of
Americans surveilled under Section 702 will never be criminally prosecuted,
so they will never know that the government has been secretly watching
them," the ACLU said in its statement Wednesday. "And without definitive
proof that the government spied on them, individuals have an incredibly
difficult time challenging the government's spying in court."

The Founders must be spinning
in their graves. Duplicity of nazi government unbounded, unchained,
unrestrained. No greater threat to liberty, all civil and constitutional
rights and liberties.

"Under the statute, which
is set to expire in December unless Congress renews it, the government
sweeps up hundreds of millions of communications -- emails and phone calls
-- involving Americans, without a warrant."

Outrageously unconstitutional.
No probable cause. No warrant. Egregious violation of the Fourth
Amendment.

"The Justice Department
informed the ACLU, in response to another FOIA request, that it had issued
a 31-page memo with its new policy, but it only gave the memo to federal
prosecutors. The document has not been publicly released. It is this document
that the ACLU is suing to release."

A fascist police-state.
Soon to be the Trump nazi's Fourth Reich. As repeatedly stated
in this publication, no foreign government, no terrorist organization,
not even the criminal element present a greater threat to life, liberty,
all civil and constitutional rights and liberties than this government.
All levels. All branches. Sadly, owned and operated, paid for
by its corporate masters.

6-2-17

Republicans are apparently
beginning to get the message. Fear not being returned to office.
In follow up to an earlier edition here and elsewhere, The Washington
Times reports:

"Lobbyists representing
Google, Facebook and other online titans are voicing concerns with a Republican-backed
bill that would strengthen privacy protections by making internet service
providers, websites and apps obtain permission from customers prior to
sharing their information with advertisers. The Internet Association
is monitoring a bill introduced in the House last week by Rep. Marsha Blackburn,
Tennessee Republican, prohibiting companies from sharing user data without
their explicit approval and instead requiring customers to “opt-in” to
such arrangements, the trade group said Tuesday."

Privacy must be no respecter
of persons. No matter their political persuasion, viewpoint.
Twitter stood tall. NPR reports:

"Twitter has dropped a
lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, saying the demand
that prompted the suit — that Twitter reveal the anonymous user behind
an "alt-gov" account — has been withdrawn."

No reason to continue
the lawsuit. The government dropped the demand.

"The original lawsuit,
filed by the social media giant on Thursday, alleged that DHS had demanded
that Twitter reveal the user behind "@ALT_uscis," an account allegedly
run by current and former Citizenship and Immigration Services employees."

Outrageous, isn't it,
that government would so abuse power to track down current and former employees
courageous enough to challenge the established order?

More outrageous? Get this:

"The summons threatened
legal action if Twitter did not comply — and asked Twitter not to disclose
the existence of the demand. Twitter sued, exposing the summons and asking
a court to declare it unenforceable."

Uncommon valor.
This needs to happen all over the country every goddamned time this shit
happens. No matter what agency. No matter the level of government.

"Because the summons has
now been withdrawn," Twitter's lawyers write in the latest filing, the
company dropped the suit."

4-7-17

In follow up to an earlier
edition of this publication, NBC News reports:

"A bill introduced in
Congress Tuesday puts strict limitations on the right of U.S. border agents
to search the electronic devices of American citizens when they cross the
border or reenter the U.S at an airport. The "Protecting Data At
the Border Act" would make it illegal for border officers to search or
seize cellphones without probable cause."

"Americans' Constitutional
rights shouldn't disappear at the border," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D.-Oregon,
who is cosponsoring the bill in the Senate with Sen. Rand Paul, R.-Kentucky.
"By requiring a warrant to search Americans' devices and prohibiting unreasonable
delay, this bill makes sure that border agents are focused on criminals
and terrorists instead of wasting their time thumbing through innocent
Americans' personal photos and other data."

3-10-17

Another massive data dump
by WikiLeaks. CBS News reports:

"WikiLeaks on Tuesday
published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence
Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears
to expose intimate details of America’s cyberespionage toolkit."

Gets worse:

"It was not immediately
clear how WikiLeaks obtained the information, code-named “Vault7,” which
included more than 8,700 documents and files. The CIA tools, if authentic,
could undermine the confidence that consumers have in the safety and security
of their computers, mobile devices and even smart TVs."

One thing for sure, none
of these devices is truly secure.

"WikiLeaks said the material
came from “an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s
Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.” It didn’t say how
the files were removed, such as possibly by a rogue employee, by hacking
a federal contractor working for the CIA or breaking into a staging server
where such hacking tools might be temporarily stored."

Imagine that. Couldn't
be, could it?

"The more than 8,000 documents
cover a host of technical topics, including what appears to be a discussion
about how to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised
surveillance devices. WikiLeaks said the data also include details on the
agency’s efforts to subvert American software products and smartphones,
including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft Windows."

How many of these devices
do you own, operate, use, thinking they're secure?

"The information dump
could not immediately be authenticated by The Associated Press, and the
CIA declined comment, but WikiLeaks has a long track record of releasing
top secret government documents. Experts who’ve started to sift through
the material said that it appeared legitimate and that the release was
almost certain to shake the CIA."

How about rattling the
cage of the citizenry that trusts this government no matter what it does
or doesn't do? Wake up. Get this:

"WikiLeaks said the archive
“appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and
contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks
with portions of the archive.”

Comfortable?

"Bob Ayers, a retired
U.S. intelligence official currently working as a security analyst, noted
that WikiLeaks has promised to release more CIA documents. “The damage
right now is relatively high level,” he said. “The potential for really
detailed damage will come in the following releases.”

Have to blame the digital
industry for not making all devices highly secure, that is, developing
and installing encryption that takes supercomputers years to crack.
Equally important? Making it as difficult as possible to frustrate
exploitation of device vulnerabilities, that is, "hacking
the endpoint," as reported by The Washington
Post:

"WikiLeaks said the trove
comprised tools — including malware, viruses, trojans and weaponized “zero
day” exploits — developed by a CIA entity known as the Engineering Development
Group, part of a sprawling cyber directorate created in recent years as
the agency shifted resources and attention to online espionage. The
digital files are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in consumer devices
including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android software and Samsung television
sets, according to WikiLeaks, which labeled the trove “Year Zero.”
In its news release, WikiLeaks said the files enable the agency to bypass
popular encryption-enabled applications — including WhatsApp, Signal and
Telegram — used by millions of people to safeguard their communications.
But experts said that rather than defeating the encryption of those applications,
the CIA’s methods rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in the devices on
which they are installed, a method referred to as “hacking the endpoint.”

Yet, the FBI Director
remains oblivious to the fact device security and encryption need to be
exponentially improved to protect us from our 'protectors.' NBC News
reports:

"FBI Director James Comey
said Wednesday the bureau is renewing its focus on the challenges posed
by the growing use of encryption."

Good to hear the bastard
and his henchmen continue to have difficulty invading privacy. He
and his stooges will just have to work harder. Much harder.
This, the price to be paid for privacy of the vast majority of the public
who do not engage in criminal activity.

"At Boston College's cybersecurity
conference Wednesday, Comey said that he a fan of "strong encryption" but
noted that "it is making more and more of the room of what the FBI investigates
dark."

The Director remains a
liar. No fan of encryption, period. To claim otherwise is no
more than unadulterated bullshit.

"Between September and
November, the FBI received 2,800 devices it had lawful authority to open
but could not open 1,200 of them "with any technique," he said."

Tough shit.
Get off your ass. Do some old fashioned police work. This,
the price to be paid for the privacy of the vast majority of the public
who commit no crimes. Why should the law abiding forfeit privacy
so you and your goons can more easily go on fishing expeditions, harass
the innocent? Why is it you gutless bastards in law enforcement get
to lie with impunity to anyone you're targeting? Yet, doesn't work
the other way around. Worse, you bastards distort and pervert what
your targets tell you. Turn it into something it's not. Then
prosecute them for lying. No more than goddamned bullshit.

"He said there needs to
a balance between privacy and the FBI's ability to lawfully access information,
a conversation that he acknowledged will require some "humility" on the
part of the bureau. "We need to stop bumper-stickering each other.
This isn't the 'FBI versus Apple,'" he said. "We need to build trust
between the government and private sector."

More bullshit. Conveniently
forgets he works ultimately for the public. Needs our trust.
Not that of Apple or any other corporate entity. Apple is beginning
to understand to sell its products it must improve security, privacy.
You goddamned jackbooted bastards in law enforcement can't seem to understand
this.

2-24-17

Encryption is an "important
enabler of human rights" according to Amnesty International. Indeed,
they're right. Consider the following from NBC News:

"Human rights group Amnesty
International has released a report calling encryption an "important enabler
of human rights" — just before Apple was due to go to court with the government
in a case that has turned what was once an obscure military technology
into a topic of water cooler conversation."

Critical to not only privacy,
but to all civil and constitutional rights and liberties under severe attack
in our formerly great country.

"At stake in the Apple
case is whether a future administration could exploit the next national
moment of crisis, and use its access to our phones to target journalists,
or persecute activists and minorities," Naureen Shah, Amnesty International
USA's director of security and human rights, said in a press release."

As Franklin wisely opined
some 230 years ago, anyone willing to trade liberty for security deserves
and winds up with neither.

"Amnesty International's
new briefing is the prominent rights group's first time laying out a comprehensive
stance on the importance of encryption. Beyond the ongoing clash between
the federal government and Apple, Amnesty argues that encryption is a crucial
tool for people resisting oppressive regimes around the world, providing
a layer of security in an age when people exchange huge amounts of information
over the Internet."

Not just around the world,
but right here in Nazi America, a goddamned fascist police-state.

"Encryption is a basic
prerequisite for privacy and free speech in the digital age. Banning encryption
is like banning envelopes and curtains. It takes away a basic tool for
keeping your private life private," Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Amnesty International's
deputy director for global issues, said in a release."

Government cannot be trusted.
Precisely, why the Founders enshrined the Bill of Rights.

1-27-17

In a vicious parting attack
against privacy and the ability to determine what is and isn't done with
one's body tissue vis a vis research, former President Obama caved in to
the scientific community. NPR reports:

"The Obama administration
has dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all federally
funded scientists to get permission from patients before using their cells,
blood, tissue or DNA for research."

This is goddamned bullshit.
Further proof positive this nazi government believes it owns your
ass cradle to grave.

1-20-17

A nazi bought and paid
for 'judge' in a nazi secret FISA 'court' has given NSA authority to resume
bulk collection of phone data.

"The National Security
Agency may have been ordered out of the phone records business, but a secret
court has said it can go ahead anyway. In a decision published Tuesday
(PDF), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court,
ruled Monday night that the NSA can resume bulk phone data collection for
at least five more months."

Nazi justice in a goddamned
fascist police-state.

"That means the NSA can
resume collecting the records for the remaining five months of the transition
period — unless another court steps in. "Neither the statute nor
the Constitution permits the government to subject millions of innocent
people to this kind of intrusive surveillance," Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal
director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "We
intend to ask the court to prohibit the surveillance and to order the NSA
to purge the records it's already collected."

Clearly, the United States
Government itself poses the greatest threat, an exigent threat,
to all civil and constitutional rights and liberties. Will certainly
worsen under the Trump nazi and his henchmen. Precisely, why resistance
must be ferocious but peaceful.

"And Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon,
a member of the Intelligence Committee, slammed the FISA court, saying
in a statement: "I see no reason for the Executive Branch to restart bulk
collection, even for a few months. This illegal dragnet surveillance violated
Americans' rights for fourteen years without making our country any safer."

Indeed. Sadly, the
worst is yet to come.

1-20-17

The healthcare community
continues to remain hard at work eviscerating privacy. NPR reports:

"Computerized medical
records are hardly new. Pioneers at one of the nation's first HMOs, Kaiser
Permanente, were using electronic medical records as far back as the 1970s
and saw them as a big part of the future of medicine."

Unfortunately, the price
is the loss of all privacy. This data is not, cannot be adequately
protected against hackers, government goons on fishing expeditions with
or without a warrant, or being sold by the corporate management suite.

"The part of it that they
didn't envision that we're envisioning now, is how proactive a role patients
would be taking," says Dr. Tracy Lieu, who heads Kaiser's research division
in Oakland, Calif."

'Patient' for what?
The term itself is achingly condescending, patronizing. Indeed, a
relic of the past when doctors thought they were gods.

"Medical records don't
simply store facts about an individual's health. There's a big potential
for a database of medical records to be mined to help shape an individual's
treatment."

This is also what makes
electronic records so dangerously susceptible to getting into the wrong
hands, being used against a healthcare consumer by a prospective employer,
etc..

"The records also include
information about patients' feelings and emotional states based on a nine-question
survey that patients routinely fill out. (Individuals are not identified
in the database.)"

Think this information
won't find its way into the hands of prospective employers? Think
it's any of the provider's goddamned business, regardless? Think
this isn't a pernicious step into the world of 1984, A Brave
New World, etc.? You're being duped. Dopes duped.

1-20-17

Think hard about the following.
The
Washington Post reports:

"WikiLeaks wants to start
building a list of verified Twitter users that would include highly sensitive
and personal information about their families, their finances and their
housing situations."

Frightening, isn't it?

“We are thinking of making
an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing
relationships,” WikiLeaks tweeted Friday."

To what end?

"The disclosure organization,
run by Julian Assange, says the information would be used for an artificial-intelligence
program. But Twitter users immediately fired back, saying WikiLeaks would
use the list to take political vengeance against those who criticize it."

Indeed.

"But the proposal faced
a sharp and swift backlash as technologists, journalists and security researchers
slammed the idea as a “sinister” and dangerous abuse of power and privacy.
“This is a good plan. If you're Darth Vader,” Matthew Green, a professor
who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted."

No end to the insanity,
is there?

12-30-16

Have a Facebook account?
You're a fool. Fox News reports:

"Governments worldwide
requested Facebook users' data nearly 60,000 times in the first half of
2016, a 27 percent increase over requests made in the second half of 2015,
according to a Facebook bi-annual report published this week."

Haven't smartened up?
Refuse to be confused with the truth? Think government has a right
to your personal data? Use it as it pleases? Set up a profile
for police databases with no probable cause a crime has indeed been committed?

"In addition to government
requests for user data, the report details which content Facebook restricts
for violating local laws. The company says it studies each request carefully
to determine whether or not it has merit, especially in emergency cases
where imminent risk of serious injury or harm is involved. It ultimately
handed over data in 80 percent of cases."

Translation? They
readily cave to government information requests. Comfortable with
that? Think Facebook user data doesn't get sold to other commercial
interests? No problem with that? None at all? No issue
with government and/or the corporate management suite knowing nearly everything
there is to know about you? That stupid? Clueless?
Ever wonder why you weren't hired for a job? Despite being highly-qualified?

"The 27 percent jump for
the latest reporting period compares to a 13 percent increase between the
first and second halves of 2015, and 18 percent growth between the second
half of 2014 and the first half of 2015. The majority of the requests came
from law enforcement agencies in the US. Of those, the most common were
related to search warrants—13,742 out of 23,854."

Think Facebook isn't giving
out data without a search warrant?

"Other categories in the
US included subpoenas and IP address traces. There were also up to 499
secret requests made for data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA). Companies are prohibited from disclosing detailed figures for
FISA requests, and they must delay reporting the aggregate figures for
at least six months."

This outrageously unconstitutional
bullshit has been going on for at least the last four decades since FISA.
No problem with this? Think things won't exponentially worsen when
the goddamned nazi takes office in several weeks?

12-30-16

Can't prosecute an innocent
American citizen who courageously exposed our government for the liars
they are? Discredit him with lies in a heavily redacted 'review'
that is not worth a shit due to the redactions. NBC News reports:

"A scathing report by
the House Intelligence Committee, backed by liberal Democrats and conservative
Republicans, concludes that Edward Snowden was a disgruntled, serial liar
who leaked for petty reasons, put American soldiers at risk and remains
in continuing contact with Russian intelligence services."

"The 37-page review, filled
with redactions of classified material, does not accuse Snowden of being
a spy, but it seeks to poke holes in nearly every aspect of his account
of why he gave reporters reams of classified documents he obtained as a
contractor — and trusted insider — with the National Security Agency."

Empty, hollow rhetoric
with no proof. Provide proof.

"Snowden immediately began
denouncing the report on Twitter from his home in Russia, saying its core
claims were made "without evidence" and that it established nothing worse
than he might have been hard to work with. His lawyer, Ben Wizner,
told NBC News he considers the report "a failed attempt to discredit Edward
Snowden, whose actions led to the most significant intelligence reforms
in a generation."

Both parties have betrayed
the public they purportedly serve. Serve only themselves. Talk
out the ass to line their pockets. This is precisely how this government
discredits whistle blowers courageous enough to expose these pieces of
human excrement to the light of day.

"Was
I a pain in the ass to work with? Perhaps; many technologists are. But
this report establishes no worse. —
Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016"

Until these gutless bastards
in government provide proof, they have no credibility. Absolutely
none. "National 'security'" is no more than a ruse these gutless
bastards hide behind to avoid accountability. ... To say nothing
of the truth.

"An Uber driver needs
your location in order to pick you up. But the latest change in Uber’s
policy asks to track riders for five minutes after they’ve already been
dropped off. That has some people questioning that these apps that
have the ability to track our location really need to know, reports CBS
News correspondent Anna Werner."

Think they won't sell
this information?

12-2-16

A while back, NPR reported:

"It's the consumers' information.
How it is used should be the consumers' choice." So said FCC Chairman Tom
Wheeler as the commission adopted rules requiring Internet service providers
such as Comcast and Verizon to get customers' permission before selling
the data they collect to marketers."

Should have happened years
ago.

"The vote was 3-2 along
party lines."

Surprised? Republicans
nearly always support their corporate masters. You didn't know that?
Not that Democrats are any better.

"ISPs are the gateway
to the Internet and collect information about the movies we watch, the
websites we visit and, in the case of smartphones, the actual physical
locations of where we are. It's a valuable trove of data, which the ISPs
typically collect and package to data brokers and marketers without consumers'
knowledge or permission."

How could this ever have
been allowed to go on? Simple. Unbridled corporate greed, their
bought and paid for shills in government.

"As Commissioner Jessica
Rosenworcel, who voted for the new rules, put it, "Our digital footprints
are no longer in sand, they are in wet cement."

Indeed.

"Under the new FCC rules,
ISPs will have to inform consumers about what information is collected
and how it is used and shared, and identify the types of entities with
which the ISP shares the data. Most important, ISPs will be required
to obtain consumers' permission — what the commission calls "opt-in consent"
— to share the information."

In follow up to earlier
material in this publication, this country is quickly turning into a fascist
police-state. Innocent citizens are subjected to warrantless scrutiny
by the jackbooted bastards in blue. Think not? Wake up.
NPR reports:

"Nearly half of all American
adults have been entered into law enforcement facial recognition databases,
according to a recent report from Georgetown University's law school. But
there are many problems with the accuracy of the technology that could
have an impact on a lot of innocent people."

Think not? You're
a fool. Wake up.

"There's a good chance
your driver's license photo is in one of these databases. The report from
the school's Center on Privacy & Technology says more than 117 million
adults' photos are stored in them. Facial recognition can be used, for
instance, when investigators have a picture of a suspect and they don't
have a name."

Still think we don't live
in a goddamned fascist police-state?

"They can run the photo
through a facial recognition program to see if it matches any of the license
photos. It's kind of like a very large digital version of a lineup, says
Jonathan Frankle, a computer scientist and one of the authors of the report,
titled "The Perpetual Line-Up."

"Instead of having a lineup
of five people who've been brought in off the street to do this, the lineup
is you. You're in that lineup all the time," he says. Frankle says the
photos that police may have of a suspect aren't always that good — they're
often from a security camera."

The jackbooted bastards
do this with no warrant. On their own authority. In direct
violation of the Fourth Amendment. Unreasonable search and seizure.
No
warrant.

"Security cameras tend
to be mounted on the ceiling," he says. "They get great views of the top
of your head, not very great views of your face. And you can now imagine
why this would be a very difficult task, why it's hard to get an accurate
read on anybody's face and match them with their driver's license photo."

"Frankle says the study
also found evidence that facial recognition software didn't work as well
with people who have dark skin. There's still limited research on why this
is. Some critics say the developers aren't testing the software against
a diverse enough group of faces. Or it could be lighting."

These bastards are on
unconstitutional fishing expeditions. No probable cause you have
committed a crime. Many innocent people have been caught up in their
web. Think not. Wake up. You're a fool.

"Because of its flaws,
facial recognition technology does bring a lot of innocent people to the
attention of law enforcement."

The bastards in blue harass
the innocent. Do so with no probable cause their victims have committed
a crime. No longer matters in a goddamned fascist police-state. The
Fourth Reich.

"Patrick Grother says
most people have a few doppelgangers out there. He's a computer scientist
with the National Institute of Standards and Technology — part of the Commerce
Department. "The larger you go, the greater the chance of a false positive,"
he says. "Inevitably if you look at a billion people you will find somebody
that looks quite similar."

Get caught in their web?
You need to prove your innocence. Ass backwards from what it ought
to be, once was. Now, guilty until proven innocent. Even back
then the public gutlessly accepted new regulations and laws that
contributed to rise and implementation of a fascist police-state.
Remember when a photo was not required for a drivers license? Or,
when thumbprints were not taken?

The laws requiring the
above occurred long before 9/11 and the vicious attack on all civil and
constitutional rights and liberties imposed by our goddamned out of control
traitorous
government. Yet, the aggressively stupid, achingly
gutless
public allowed it. Why should this goddamned hopelessly corrupt,
abusive, inept government have a photo and thumbprints of a citizen who
has committed no crime? Why? Why is this tolerated by
the aggressively stupid, hopelessly gutless public?

"Implied consent" as a
condition of having a drivers license? A goddamned ruse. There
is nothing implied or consensual in requiring a citizen to give a breath
sample or lose his or her license to drive. No one ever agrees to
this. If they refuse to sign the DL application, they are not issued
a license. Simple as that. If they refuse a photo or thumbprints,
the same. There is no consent implied or otherwise. The applicant
is forced. Has no choice. Think not? Wake up.
If you have no DL and drive, get caught, you go to jail.

Worse? Implied consent
is now moot, anyway. The jackbooted bastards in blue get a warrant
for a blood sample by a 'judge' that nearly always rubber stamps whatever
the bastards want. What consent? Where? Implied or otherwise.
Yet, another example we now live in a goddamned fascist police-state. The
Fourth Reich.

'The Perpetual Line-Up'

A study by the Center
on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law examined police facial recognition
technology. Here are some of the findings and recommendations.

Findings

Law
enforcement face recognition networks include over 117 million American
adults — and may soon include many more. By
running face recognition searches against 16 states' driver's license photo
databases, the FBI has built a biometric network that primarily includes
law-abiding Americans. Major
police departments are exploring real-time face recognition on live surveillance
camera video. Law
enforcement face recognition is unregulated. Police
face recognition could be used to stifle free speech. Most
law enforcement agencies do little to ensure that their systems are accurate. Without
specialized training, human users make the wrong decision about a match
half the time. Police
face recognition will disproportionately affect African-Americans.

Recommendations

Law
enforcement face recognition searches should be conditioned on an individualized
suspicion of criminal conduct. Mug
shot databases used for face recognition should exclude people who were
found innocent or who had charges against them dropped or dismissed. Searches
of driver's license and ID photos should occur only under a court order
issued upon a showing of probable cause. Limit
searches of license photos — and after-the-fact investigative searches
— to investigations of serious offenses. Real-time
video surveillance should only occur in life-threatening public emergencies
under a court order backed by probable cause. Use
of face recognition to track people on the basis of their race, ethnicity,
religious or political views should be prohibited. The
FBI should test its face recognition system for accuracy and racially biased
error rates, and make the results public.

Source: The Perpetual
Line-Up

10-28-16

In order to identify and
track Chicago criminal jackbooted bastards in blue, an Internet firm recently
launched a new website designed to do just that. The Washington
Times reports:

"It’s rare when a misconduct
complaint filed against a Chicago police officer ends in discipline: Complaints
records show officers were punished as a result of just 2 percent of the
more than 28,000 misconduct accusations from 2011 to 2015.

"One problem blamed for
the low discipline rate is the immediate dismissal of more than a quarter
of complaints in which an officer can’t be identified, says a transparency
and digital rights advocacy group that has designed an online crowdsourcing
tool to help determine the identities of involved officers.

"Lucy Parsons Lab this
week launched OpenOversight, a website the public can use to search for
officers’ names, badge numbers and — when available — photographs. The
first of its kind in the United States, the project enables users to search
for officers by entering information about their rank, estimated age, race
and gender."

Once fully implemented
and perfected, it needs to be expanded nationwide. Be especially
useful here in Llano County where the jackbooted criminal bastards do all
they can to avoid being identified. From blackened vehicle windows
to refusing to verbally identify themselves or provide a business card
to those unjustly harassed, shaken down.

The public has a right
to this information. These lawless bastards pose an exigent threat
to not only the rights of their victims, but to their very lives as well.
In this County alone, there remain five highly questionable killings by
law enforcement. Including the latest, which the Sheriff some six
months after the fact, still refuses to identify the officers who pulled
the trigger. A fascist police-state.

Yahoo has again betrayed
the best interests of its users. Egregiously, so. This company
used to be top of the line. No longer. NBC News reports:

"Yahoo secretly built
a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails
for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according
to people familiar with the matter."

It's clearly betrayed
the best interests of its users. Has been used the last several years
as a portal to this publication. Have received, however, absolutely
no email from readers of this publication. Not one. Do continue
to receive newsletters from several politicians and groups, however.
Precisely, why this email account still remains open and active.

If you happen to need
to make contact, email me at libertyinperil@openmailbox.org.
Have changed the contact email address on the homepage, this edition, and
all future ones. Since I have received no email from any of you to
the Yahoo address, have no concern any of you have had your privacy invaded.

You should all be using
Tor as browser to protect your privacy, make it as difficult as possible
for government and its corporate masters to track. You should not
think, however, you can commit crimes and not be caught. You will
be. The government will have to work harder, but has the resources
to do so.

"The company complied
with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions
of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or
FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface
of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching
all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning
a small number of accounts in real time."

This is outrageously unacceptable.
The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant, probable cause. These jackbooted
bastards in government are shameless. So is Yahoo. Inexcusable
betrayal of their users.

"It is not known what
information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted
Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an
email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if
any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers
besides Yahoo with this kind of request."

Again, this is a pernicious
invasion of privacy and an egregious betrayal of its users by Yahoo.

"According to the two
former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey
the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure
of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top
security job at Facebook."

If true, Mayer needs to
go.

10-14-16

Privacy, or more accurately
the lack thereof, remains a problem at Apple as well. The Washington
Post reports:

"When a user sends someone
a message through Apple’s iMessage feature, Apple encrypts that message
between Apple devices so that only the sender and recipient can read its
contents. But a Wednesday report from news site the Intercept is a good
reminder that not all data related to iMessage has that same level of protection
— and that information can still be turned over to law enforcement."

Yet, another egregious
infringement on privacy. In a goddamned fascist police-state.
Indeed, The Fourth Reich.

"That may be surprising
to everyday users who view Apple as a privacy champion after it's legal
battle with the Justice Department this year over a court order that would
force the company to break its own security measures. But to experts, it's
just a fact of how communication systems work. For instance, as security
expert and noted iPhone hacker Will Strafach notes, Apple needs to know
things such as with whom you're chatting via iMessage so that it can deliver
your messages."

Encryption and adherence
to privacy still leave much to be desired at Apple and elsewhere.
Gets worse. CBS News reports:

“This is a troubling vision
of the future where there might be massive government surveillance done
with computers,” Opsahl said. “The government may well say they were only
targeting a string of characters used by a foreigner, but it just so happened
that hundreds of millions of innocent people also had their emails examined
too.”

This is national socialist
government run amok. Serving itself. Not the best interests
of its citizens. In fact, it's an egregious betrayal of public trust.

"Patrick Toomey, a staff
attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that
the government order appears to be “unprecedented and unconstitutional.”

10-7-16

No one wants pedophiles
to go uncaught. At the same time, if you grant carte blanche to government,
the innocent get caught up in the consequent subsequent loss of civil and
constitutional rights and liberties. An unconstitutional trade
off, that is, deliberate bastardization, perversion of the Bill of Rights.
Think not? Wake up. The Washington Post reports:

"When the FBI searched
Andrew Workman’s computer they say they found pornographic videos of girls
as young as 3 years old. A federal judge in Colorado ruled this month that
the computer hack that helped the bureau uncover the videos should never
have been allowed."

Cluelessly, think not?
Ends justify the means? Again, wake up. You're not thinking
straight. Foolishly, ignoring the deliberate shitting on the Bill
of Rights required to do so perpetrated by government goons vis a vis the
hack.

"Why? Because the search
warrant permitting the hack was issued by a magistrate judge in Virginia
— outside the judicial district in which Workman lived — and in an apparent
violation of federal criminal rules."

Those rules are in effect
for a damned good reason. The United States Constitution. This
is extremely important since it now allows prosecutors and their shills
on the bench to go on fishing expeditions. All across our formerly
great country. Extends jurisdiction, in effect, across the universe.

"But a shift in federal
rules set to go into effect in December says that a judge in one district
can approve a warrant to hack computers outside that district in cases
where the computers’ location is shielded."

Innocent people will get
caught up in the web. Have their Fourth Amendment right to privacy
deliberately abrogated by prosecutors and judges conducting fishing expeditions.
Gets worse. Far worse. Get this. Read it carefully:

"But privacy advocates
and some lawmakers contend that the amendment to Rule 41 of the Federal
Rules of Criminal Procedure would legally sanction mass hacking, in which
federal law enforcement, with one warrant, can hack thousands of computers
whose locations are unknown. And they argue that the rule change would
allow prosecutors to seek out judges they feel would be more sympathetic
to their warrant application."

No problem with this?
No concerns? Wake up. You're being cleverly bamboozled
by the goddamned fascist bastards who truly believe they run and own our
formerly great country. A fascist police-state. The Fourth
Reich.

"If the rule change goes
through, and if the government can show probable cause, “the FBI gets the
authority to hack anywhere in the world,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal
technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We desperately need
to have congressional hearings and investigations into the use of this
technology before it becomes the tool of choice of law enforcement.”

No problem with this?
U.S. jurisdiction extending across the universe? No more than a goddamned
fascist police-state. The Fourth Reich. Who really
won the Second World War European Theater? Wake up.
Before too late.

More to come as this fiasco
develops.

10-7-16

Edward Snowden remains
a bona fide hero. Has had a profound effect on government warrantless
snooping, -- and otherwise. The Washington Times reports:

"The FBI’s use of a surveillance
statute to collect Americans’ phone and email records has declined since
details about the program were leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, a watchdog
report has found. The FBI’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act
to obtain “business records” as part of national security investigations
peaked in 2012, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approving
212 orders seeking records, according to a report released Thursday by
the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office."

Amazing the effect of
just a little sunlight, isn't it? Hopefully, only the beginning.
We have a long, long, long way to go, however. Light years.

"The program was publicly
disclosed in June 2013 after the former National Security Agency contractor
leaked information to the press. That year, the number of orders authorized
by the court dropped to 179. The number of orders approved by the court
has continued to decrease annually, with 142 orders approved in 2015."

Close scrutiny has a profound
effect on out of control jackbooted national socialists hell bent on imposing
their version of a fascist police-state.

"The program allowed authorities
to collect information about clients from service providers, such as email
or phone records — including the numbers, times and durations of calls.
Outcry over the program after Mr. Snowden’s revelations led to reform the
surveillance program. When Congress renewed the USA Freedom Act last year,
it blocked bulk collection and storage of data."

This, precisely, is the
value of whistle blowers like Snowden. Had this information not been
released, the public wouldn't have known how widespread, determined, concerted,
well-engineered the attack on privacy had become. To say nothing
of the evisceration of all civil and constitutional rights and liberties.

"A deputy chief within
the FBI’s National Security Division partly blamed Mr. Snowden’s disclosures
for the decrease in use of the provision. “He attributed the decline
in part to revelations by Edward Snowden about the U.S. government’s use
of Section 215 to collect bulk telephony metadata, both in terms of the
stigma attached to use of Section 215 and increased resistance from providers,”
the inspector general’s report said."

This is certainly good
news. Bodes well for liberty and the Bill of Rights. Anything
to rein in the national socialist bastards is a positive development.

"Responding to the report,
FBI officials told the inspector general’s office that the degree to which
Mr. Snowden’s disclosure led to the decrease was speculative and said agents
had come to rely more on a different statute to obtain surveillance approvals
— specifically, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
which allows surveillance of foreigners."

Again, this is bullshit.
Snowden exposed warrantless surveillance of innocent American citizens.
The point made by the FBI in the above quote is beside the point.
The bastards in the FBI were surveilling innocent American citizens.
That's what the controversy is about. Not bona fide surveillance
of foreigners suspected of terrorism.

"Under the USA Freedom
Act reforms enacted in 2015, authorities can’t collect and keep bulk telephone
data in government databases. Instead, spy agencies have to ask phone companies
for data — and they must submit a narrow search so it’s clear that analysts
are looking for a specific person, number or group, rather than bulk collection."

This is a good thing.
But not good enough. Reins in the jackbooted bastards in the
FBI and other federal agencies to at least some small extent. Much
more needs to be done, however. Much more.

"Frustration with oversight
of the Section 215 program and the length of time it took to approve orders
under it appear to have played a role in the decline of its use even before
the law’s reform. “Agents also told the OIG that they increasingly
were electing to use criminal legal process instead of FISA authority in
counterterrorism and cyber investigations because of their frustrations
with the lack of timeliness and the level of oversight in the business
records process,” the report states. Some were opting to open parallel
criminal cases and using grand juries “to obtain the same information more
quickly and with less oversight than a business records order.”

This is a positive development.
A good thing. These pieces of traitorous human excrement are going
on fishing expeditions. Against innocent people. People who
through no fault of their own get caught up in their web. Talk to
these bastards, and if they don't like you, you'll be falsely charged with
lying to them, then prosecuted. They, however, lie to the
public with impunity. A double standard. No honor. None
at all. They're traitors.

9-30-16

There are some good federal
judges who respect the Constitution and respond to the need for transparency.
U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell is certainly one of them. The
Washington Post reports:

"In ordering the first-ever
release by a full federal district court of a year’s worth of secret government
surveillance requests, U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington
this week added to a decades-long career spent charting the frontier of
technology and the law in the nation’s capital. Howell on Wednesday
stepped into the fierce debate over the limits of secrecy and law enforcement
searches in a digital age by releasing a list of more than 200 cases in
which U.S. prosecutors in the District sought court orders for data about
individuals’ phone, email or online communications. Nationwide, more than
20,000 such orders were approved in 2013 alone; almost none ever are unsealed."

About time. The
public is entitled to this information. It is the only way to know
whether our government is adhering to the United States Constitution including
the Bill of Rights. Hat's off to the judge. She did the right
thing. Hopefully, a portend of things to come. Certainly, far
better than the specter of an unwanted dreaded second American revolution
already catastrophically looming on the horizon. Hear the rumble?

9-30-16

The public remains clueless
regarding changes in healthcare. Get this. CBS News reports:

"It’s a brave new world
for health care consumers. Patients are faced with an avalanche of new
technologies and developments that are supposed to revolutionize the way
they manage their health care. But according to a study released
last week from the PwC Health Research Institute, the revolution is slow
in coming. “Most [consumers] don’t shop for care, ask about prices,
email with their clinicians or use telehealth options. Most don’t send
their physicians data from their activity trackers. Most remain skeptical
of the value of electronic medical record systems despite their ubiquity
in examination rooms,” says the report, entitled “Surviving Seismic Change:
Winning a Piece of the $5 trillion U.S. Health EcoSystem.”

The first problem facing
consumers of healthcare is the fact they continue to tolerate condescending,
patronizing attitudes still prevalent among too many providers. The
word 'patient' itself is condescending. Patient for what?
'Client' would be far more appropriate. Providers don't seem to understand
care receivers are the ones truly in charge of their care. Not
the provider. The provider is no more than a highly-paid consultant.
Not
a god.

The receiver of care makes
the ultimate decision, not the provider. Care receivers need
to smarten up. Question all pricing. On everything.
Force providers to justify cost. Care givers don't seem to understand
many of their clients will not participate in telehealth options,
activity trackers, etc. because their data is vulnerable to theft.

-- Not only by hackers,
however. Government jackbooted bastards in blue and their government
handlers can seize such data via court order. Also, data is shared
with the corporate management suite for marketing purposes. There
is no privacy. Data is compromised constantly. No one does
anything about this problem. Often, providers don't not even report
such data theft and privacy intrusion by government goons to the ultimate
owners of that data, you, the public. Why do you tolerate this?

7-15-16

The Right simply doesn't
get it. Especially, the Religious Right. While the Pope has
indeed attempted to force badly needed change in the Catholic Church, he
has a long, long, long way to go. Archbishop Charles Chaput
is the head of the Church in Philadelphia.

Happen to be a "good"
Catholic? Get divorced in Philadelphia without benefit of a Church
annulment? Want to remarry? You can't have sex with
your new wife or husband. ... According to the Archbishop who continues
to follow the guidelines of former Pope St. John Paul II:

"Undertaking to live
as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly remarried
to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance, which could then
open the way to the Eucharist."

Say what?"Live
as brother and sister?" That's absolutely
insane. Psychotic. Indicative of the continuing failure of
the Church. The current Pope needs to lay down the law. Rein
in Church hierarchy who simply refuse to live in reality. Of equal
importance? The problem of pedophile priests and their treatment
by Church hierarchy continues to be an issue the Church abjectly refuses
to adequately address and remedy.

Sex is indeed a normal
biological function, a need to be satisfied that is intended by nature
to be far more than facilitation of reproduction alone. Apparently,
the Padre can't seem to grasp this. ... A biological function that
is truly no different than other biological needs and functions, -- like
eating, sleeping, breathing, urination, defecation, etc.. -- Other
than an unwanted child that could be the end result.

Even that could be avoided
through birth control or abortion if one finds oneself pregnant. Equally
to the point, think the good Padre can or should control or dictate any
or all of those other biological functions and needs mentioned above as
well? Should any individual or church have that power? To say
nothing of dictatorial government? Think so? Time to move to
Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, etc.. Leave
this country to those of us who truly treasure liberty.

7-8-16

Things are going backwards
at Apple. The corporate bastards have been granted a patent for technology
that would make it impossible to record video and audio at any venue that
doesn't want any recording conducted by patrons. Would use infrared
emitters to temporarily disable recording via smart phones, lap tops, tablets,
cameras, etc.. Nothing quite like f--king the paying public for the
benefit of the hopelessly greedy, is there?

Worse, this technology
could be used by government to prevent police from being held criminally
accountable for their crimes by videos produced by the public. Or,
used to limit free speech and expression. Or, prevent any recording
in designated areas government doesn't wish to be held accountable for.
Doesn't want the public to know about. Jackbooted thugs in law enforcement
could certainly use this technology to shut down activists in direct violation
of the First Amendment.

7-1-16

Amazing how the judiciary
shits on the Bill of Rights. Remains in the pocket of law enforcement.
Think about this very carefully. No one wants to see a pedophile
escape justice. No one. Does that justify the FBI or any other
law enforcement agency unconstitutionally hacking into the offender's computer
without a warrant? Think so?

Ends justify the means?
Believe that? How about if the goons on a fishing expedition hack
into yours? No probable cause. You've done nothing illegal.
Happen to be an upstanding citizen. You likely wouldn't even know
you had been violated. Wouldn't bother you? Not at all?
How about if they conducted a "sneak and peak" physical search of your
house and computer while you weren't there? Left no trace.
Never bothered to inform you.

No problem with that?
Wake
up. The bastards have been doing it across the country with impunity.
Once in awhile, someone calls them on it. Usually, because the jackbooted
thugs had to own up to it because their target was indicted. The
Exclusion Rule is clearly no longer in effect. Know what that is?
Decades ago the Supreme Court ruled evidence obtained illegally, that is,
without a warrant and probable cause, had to be excluded at trial.

For a damned good reason.
If it wasn't, police would simply do whatever they pleased, legal or illegal.
That is, no warrant. No probable cause. Do so with impunity.
Now, frighteningly, that seems to have changed. Courts are rubber
stamping their jackbooted bastards in blue. Shamelessly. Many
examples. Here's one recent one. The following was written
by Mark Rumold of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"Federal Court: The Fourth
Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer

"In a dangerously flawed
decision unsealed today, a federal district court in Virginia ruled that
a criminal defendant has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in his
personal computer, located inside his home. According to the court, the
federal government does not need a warrant to hack into an individual's
computer.

"This decision is the
latest in, and perhaps the culmination of, a series of troubling decisions
in prosecutions stemming from the FBI’s investigation of Playpen—a Tor
hidden services site hosting child pornography. The FBI seized the server
hosting the site in 2014, but continued to operate the site and serve malware
to thousands of visitors that logged into the site. The malware located
certain identifying information (e.g., MAC address, operating system, the
computer’s “Host name”; etc) on the attacked computer and sent that information
back to the FBI. There are hundreds of prosecutions, pending across
the country, stemming from this investigation.

"Courts overseeing these
cases have struggled to apply traditional rules of criminal procedure and
constitutional law to the technology at issue. Recognizing this, we've
been participating as amicus to educate judges on the significant legal
issues these cases present. In fact, EFF filed an amicus brief in this
very case, arguing that the FBI’s investigation ran afoul of the Fourth
Amendment. The brief, unfortunately, did not have the intended effect.

"The implications for
the decision, if upheld, are staggering: law enforcement would be free
to remotely search and seize information from your computer, without a
warrant, without probable cause, or without any suspicion at all. To say
the least, the decision is bad news for privacy. But it's also incorrect
as a matter of law, and we expect there is little chance it would hold
up on appeal. (It also was not the central component of the judge's decision,
which also diminishes the likelihood that it will become reliable precedent.)

"But the decision underscores
a broader trend in these cases: courts across the country, faced with unfamiliar
technology and unsympathetic defendants, are issuing decisions that threaten
everyone's rights. As hundreds of these cases work their way through the
federal court system, we'll be keeping a careful eye on these decisions,
developing resources to help educate the defense bar, and doing all we
can to ensure that the Fourth Amendment's protections for our electronic
devices aren't eroded further. We'll be writing more about these cases
in the upcoming days, too, so be sure to check back in for an in-depth
look at the of the legal issues in these cases, and the problems with the
way the FBI handled its investigation."

This abuse, a direct abrogation
of the Fourth Amendment and its protections, is an exigent threat
to us all. Consider the above very carefully. Their target
happened to be guilty. Did not have to be. It could have been
someone totally innocent. Who would never had known the jackbooted
bastards in the FBI had done this.

This is now a fascist
police-state. Our government agencies, particularly law enforcement
and the courts, cannot be trusted. They do as they please.
With impunity. No consequences. No one to rein them in.
This has become TheFourth Reich. No more than Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy. You have cowardly allowed this to occur.

Your gutless refusal to
question authority has given these national socialist bastards carte blanche
to do as they please. Again, with impunity. Zero accountability.
The ends justify the means to these nazi bastards. There is no greater
threat to our formerly great country than all levels of corrupt, abusive,
inept government.

They remain the true threat.
No foreign power, no terrorist organization, nor the criminal element pose
a greater threat to freedom, that is, all civil and constitutional rights
and liberties than these jackbooted national socialist fascist bastards
who have taken over our formerly great nation. This is why infringement
of the Second Amendment is egregiously unacceptable.

The Founders wisely knew
the last best defense against corrupt, abusive, inept government is a well-armed
public. Precisely, why these gutless bastards in government falsely
promulgate gun control. They know all too well only a small fraction
of the public has been killed in massacres perpetrated by terrorists.

What they truly fear is
the unwanted dreaded second American revolution catastrophically looming
on the horizon. This is what has caught their attention. Paralyzed
by fear, they do all they can to force gun control after every mass killing.
They wish to remain in power. No matter what they do. Yet,
it's increasingly clear they have no willingness to protect and defend
the Constitution including the Bill of Rights. Only shit on them.

Wake up. You're
being egregiously f--ked by this government and the jackbooted bastards
who work for it, line their pockets. ... Right, Sheriff?
TL? Benevolence? What's that? Wake up. You're
being egregiously f--ked. Hopelessly, bamboozled.

6-24-16

The Washington Post
reports:

"The Senate on Wednesday
rejected a Republican-led effort to allow the FBI to access a person’s
Internet browsing history, email account data and other electronic communications
without a court order in terrorism and spy cases."

For the moment, Republican
fascists have been prevented from further shitting on the Fourth Amendment
and its requirement of probable cause and a warrant to invade the privacy
of the American public. Received this information too late for full
inclusion in this edition. Will cover it in much greater detail in
the next.

5-27-16

Laughably, Republicans
in the House have initiated an effort to impeach the IRS commissioner.
Good luck. Hope they're successful. Think they're doing it
for the right reasons, however, that is the IRS is a truly oppressive agency
looting f--ked taxpayers? Think again. Not so. Not a
chance. Rather, Republicans continue to have their panties in a wad
over the bungling of the Tea Party investigation by the IRS. Get
real, you Right Wing f--kers. There's a hell of a lot worse this
outrageously abusive agency is guilty of besides a repressive illegal investigation
of your compadres.

5-27-16

Facebook's facial recognition
is reportedly better than that of the FBI. A federal judge is reportedly
allowing a lawsuit to proceed that challenges Facebook's policy of allowing
users to tag a photo of someone without their permission.
Think how valuable this is to the goons at the FBI and elsewhere in the
law enforcement community. It certainly increases their access to
private information they have no right to. No probable cause.
No warrant.

5-20-16

Missouri is the only state
that does not maintain a database on people who are prescribed opiate pain
killers. Does not do so over privacy concerns. No data is safe.
Can easily be hacked. Most of it, unencrypted. Shared with
those who will use it against people seeking work, housing, benefits, etc..
It's amazing how incredibly stupid and cowardly the public has become in
our formerly great country.

... And falsely dependent
on government determined to create a goddamned fascist police-state. Think
innocent people in severe pain are not consequently harassed, f--ked over
by jackbooted goons who have no clue? Simply get their cookies off
abusing authority? Putting their noses where they don't belong?

5-6-16

Big Data, despite the
above and the egregious inability to protect that data, still believes
it has the answer to all mankind's problems. Bullshit.
They have nothing to offer other than invading privacy, using that data
to line corporate coffers. Believe otherwise? You're hopelessly
aggressively stupid, achingly ignorant. -- May be a bridge in Brooklyn
and oceanfront in Arizona you may indeed be interested in.

5-6-16

Major corporations are
beginning to get the message, the absolute need for end to end encryption.
Google and Yahoo among a number of them. About time. They need
to step it up. The greatest threat now is no foreign power, no terrorist
organization, or the criminal element. The greatest threat is presented
by all levels of government here in our formerly great country.

Law enforcement and government
officials need to be reined in. Since that is not likely any time
soon, short of an unwanted dreaded second American revolution, it is time
for end to end encryption to slow the bastards down. They have absolutely
no respect or regard for all civil and constitutional rights and liberties.
Rather their evisceration. "We don't need no stinkin' rights in
Nazi America." Their goal is a goddamned fascist police-state.
...
Right, Sheriff? TL?

5-6-16

Telcordia is a Swedish-owned
database firm that was commissioned by our national socialist government
to set up a telephone database for law enforcement. Why? What
business is it of our goddamned government and out of control law enforcement?
Most of those in this database are law-abiding citizens. Why is their
privacy abrogated by these hopelessly pernicious untrustworthy jackbooted
bastards with no warrant? No court order.

Insult to injury, the
dopey bastards now fear since foreigners work on this database, its security
could have been compromised. What webs we weave. Where is public
opposition to this goddamned bullshit? Where is your outrage?
Why does business go on as usual? Why do you tolerate this?
Gutless? Given up? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
You're sheep. Cattle. Have a ring through your nose.

Originally, back in 1997,
this database was formed for what seemed to be a legitimate purpose.
That is, so people could keep the same phone number when they changed phone
companies. Like everything else in our formerly great country, give
goddamned government an inch they take a light year. They did.
You tolerated it. Gutless? Non-self reliant? Reliant
on your goddamned corporate masters and their bought and paid for lackeys
in government? Now, you reap what you sow. Tough shit. Chew
harder.

5-6-16

Once again, the goddamned
Supreme Court has recently taken yet another raucous hard dump on the Fourth
Amendment. It will now allow judges to issue search warrants for
access to computers anywhere in the country. This is yet another
example we now live in a fascist police-state. FBI goons and others
will exponentially increase fishing expeditions. Make it easier for
government jackbooted bastards to hack into anyone's computer. If
Congress does not act before 12/1, the new rules become permanent.
Google and civil liberties groups are strongly opposed. Rightfully,
so. Nazi justice in Nazi America. A goddamned fascist police-state.
A raucous Sieg Heil!, Sheriff? TL?

4-29-16

Europe is light years
ahead of the United States vis a vis digital privacy. Further restrictions
on American corporations such as Google as well as the U.S. government
are pending. About time. Same needs to occur here in
our formerly great country. The President in Germany spoke to young
people in Berlin:

"I want to say this to
young people who value their privacy and spend a lot of time on their phones:
The threat of terrorism is real. I've worked to reform our surveillance
programs to ensure that they're consistent with the rule of law and upholding
our values, like privacy -- and, by the way, we include the privacy of
people outside of the United States."

The President is a liar.
The direct opposite is the case. Obama did absolutely nothing to
rein in his jackbooted goons in the FBI. Quite the opposite.
The President and his jackbooted henchmen in law enforcement have no understanding
or respect for privacy, all civil and constitutional rights and liberties.
They continue to shit on them. The young in Europe, unlike our own
here, know full well the President is a liar. Fully understand he
and his goons recently invaded the privacy of the German Chancellor.
Tapped her cellphone.

They also know jackbooted
law enforcement continues to go on digital fishing expeditions with no
probable cause, no warrant. Stingray has not been reined in.
Far from it. The fact that terrorism is real does not mean the President
and goddamned nazi law enforcement in the United States have any right
to access digital data belonging to innocent citizens.

Have no right to mass
collect all data coming through Internet fiber optic cables or any other
mode of transmission. Including warrantless use of Stingray on cell
towers. Yet, continue to do so under the ruse of "national 'security.'"
This goddamned unconstitutional bullshit must end. Hopefully, it
will be forced on the American government as European privacy rules change.
Corporations like Google prosecuted, sued, and/or prevented from continuing
to do business in Europe.

The effect of such changes
in European laws, rules, and regulations would likely snow ball.
Would consequently force change here in the fascist police-state
we now live in. The President, his henchmen, and his stooges in the
Republican and Democratic Parties use fear of terrorism to keep the peasants
in their place, effectively, easily establish a goddamned fascist police-state.
Through fear.

They continue to do this
despite growing opposition. Fail to hear the rumble. That of
an unwanted dreaded second American revolution catastrophically looming
on the horizon. Remain determinedly deaf. Consequently, the
doomsday revolution clock strikes ever closer to midnight. Yet, the
cowardly public continues to gutlessly believe the bullshit coming from
the corporate management suite's bought and paid for government shills.

4-29-16

Apple is still cooperating
with government goons on thousands of law enforcement requests. Claims
any request for customer content must come with a warrant. Is that
right? Also claims most requests have to do with lost phones.
Again, can this be believed? Clearly, Apple has been placing law
enforcement before customer privacy. Has apparently been doing so
for years. Until the air clears and much more is known about that
cooperation, it would not be wise to trust the security of any Apple device.

4-29-16

Subsequent to writing
the above, the jackbooted bastards in the FBI announced they will not inform
Apple or anyone else of the security flaw in the San Bernadino smartphone.
This is a change for these jackbooted thugs. In the past, they always
informed manufacturers so customers could be protected from hackers.
Clearly, no longer.

4-22-16

National socialist Manhattan
District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. traitorously, treasonously, treacherously
abrogated his oath of office to protect and defend the United States Constitution.
This goddamned fascist disingenuously, hypocritically urged the U.S. Senate
to pass a bill that would force Apple and others to provide a backdoor
to their encryption:

"There are victims of
crime, survivors of crime, that are waiting for the Senate to lead and
find a way forward, so we can access key evidence that now resides on smartphones
that cannot be opened."

Tough shit, you fascist
son of a bitch. Work harder at investigation, you clueless
turd. This goddamned fascist police-state nazi clearly doesn't understand
this
is the price of liberty. If there is no privacy, there is no
liberty. This piece of shit cannot grasp the fact a backdoor would
enable prosecutors and their jackbooted goons in law enforcement to go
on warrantless fishing trips carte blanche.

As they already have,
and will continue to do whenever they can. A backdoor would make
it exponentially easier, however. The Constitution and its requirements
mean nothing to a national socialist. Nothing at all. They
get their cookies off looking up the ass of a hopelessly gullible public
that cowardly continues to tolerate this goddamned bullshit. Until
the public wakes up and realizes they've been had, nothing will change.

Prosecutors and police
have repeatedly proven they cannot be trusted. Provide them a backdoor
and these nazi sons of bitches will conduct warrantless fishing expeditions
continually, at will. Again, they already have when they could.
Have not shown restraint and good judgment. What nazi can?
Give these bastards an inch, again, they take a light-year. Cannot
be trusted.

If this legislation finally
passes and gets signed into law by our treacherous President, Apple and
other manufacturers could not be trusted. Would betray their users
any time they received a court order. Users concerned about privacy
would be forced to stop using smartphones and tablets. Certainly, anything
based on Apple operating systems as well as Google androids.

Would be wise to use laptops
with encryption apps downloaded from foreign providers. Save data
anywhere but on the cloud. Or even on the hard drive. Make
it as difficult as possible for these nazi bastards to find data.
When they do, it needs to be encrypted. Encryption that would take
these nosy nazis years to break. ... Only to find after all this
effort and expense there is nothing criminal there anyway.

Stick it to these fascist
sons of bitches. Make it as costly, difficult, and unproductive as
possible. Fail to stand up for your rights? Too cowardly to
resist police-state tactics? You're hopelessly gutless. Deserve
what you get. F--ked. Too bad the rest of us have to suffer
for your cowardice and aggressive stupidity.

4-22-16

Presidential candidate
Sen. Ted "Screws Loose" Cruz, as Texas Solicitor General back in 2007,
defended an outrageously perverse statute prohibiting consenting adults
from using sex toys in the privacy of their bedrooms. What this national
socialist, unabashed fascist and the Nazi State of Texas were determined
to do was force their convoluted religious and ideological views on the
public in direct violation of the First Amendment Establishment Clause,
Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments vis a vis privacy.

What consenting adults
do in the privacy of the bedroom is none of the goddamned government's
business or the nazi bastards who believe they run and own this out of
control fascist police-state. Who the hell are they to impose their
phony 'morality' on anyone? Especially when the goddamned hypocrites
are robbing the taxpayers blind, murdering innocent people during traffic
stops, executing the innocent in the name of the people, sending people
to war to line the pockets of their corporate masters, etc..

Sadly, the list can go
on and on. The Establishment Clause clearly precludes these phony
sons of bitches from forcing their religious views on anyone. This
outrageously fascist son of a bitch continues to believe he had the duty
to defend the law. Horse shit. Every shyster in government
enjoys discretion. They all know it. Use it as an excuse when
they let one of their compadres legally off the hook. Conveniently
forget, Senator? Especially, in law enforcement. That's why
so many murders committed by cops on the job go unprosecuted.

This national socialist
piece of shit was deliberately trying to force his perverse religious views
on the public. Rightfully, lost the case. Thank God he did.
... Hey, Ted? You and the missus don't wish to use a dildo in the
bedroom? No problem. Don't. Just don't force your perverse
religious views on others. Not only do they hypocritically stink,
they're goddamned un-American.

4-22-16

Microsoft has finally
stepped up. For years, they tolerated a gag rule imposed by the fascist
police-state we now live in. Our goddamned nazi government blocked
Microsoft from informing customers whenever government goons served them
with a warrant to read a customer's email. This is, and was, outrageously
unconstitutional. A violation of both the First and Fourth Amendments.
They've finally sued the 'Justice' Department. What took so long?

NPR reports:

"According to the complaint
filed in district court in Seattle, the company received about 5,600 demands
for customer data from September 2014 up through last month. And nearly
half of those came with gag orders – forbidding Microsoft to tell said
customers that the government was looking at their emails or calendars
or other files stored in the Microsoft cloud. And of those orders, the
vast majority had no time limit."

Think these jackbooted
bastards are not on a fishing expedition? With or without a warrant?
Talk about looking up your goddamned ass! Right, Sheriff?
Again, this is goddamned nazi justice in goddamned Nazi America.
Indeed, a goddamned fascist police-state. Wake up. You're being
egregiously f--ked by your out of control government.

You tolerate this egregiously
intolerable fascist police-state bullshit? You're hopelessly stupid.
Achingly, gutless. Get what you deserve. Yet, you continue
to defend the rights of these jackbooted bastards to f--k you. Why?
Too bad the rest of us have to suffer for your cowardice, aggressive stupidity.

4-15-16

The national socialist
outrageously corrupt and abusive Federal Bureau of Investigation has informed
a New York judge it intends to continue pursuit of a suit against
Apple requiring them to hack into a smartphone owned by an alleged drug
dealer in Brooklyn. Apple needs to stand tall. If it capitulates
to this nazi agency, it will indeed lose all credibility, -- and business.

Apple has repeatedly and
cowardly capitulated to FBI demands in the past. Deliberately betrayed
its customers. Gutlessly turned its backs on the Bill of Rights.
Consequently, the demands of this nazi agency and others in government
have exponentially increased. Give a goddamned dictator an inch,
the son of a bitch takes a light-year. Wake up.

Time to stand up.
... All you cowardly sons of bitches out there who gutlessly give this
national socialist, fascist, nazi goddamned police-state government the
benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it. They're bamboozling
you. Feeding you a line of shit. Egregiously f--king you because
they know you're gullible, that is, aggressively stupid, cowardly, gutless.
Wake
up.

4-15-16

Amazing how incredibly
aggressively stupid former Presidents can be. His wife running for
President, Slick Willy figuratively shot himself and his wife in the ass
during a confrontation with Black Lives Matter protesters during a recent
Hillary campaign rally. Amazing how the former President defended
a goddamned racist 'law and order' bill passed and signed into law during
his regime.

This nazi law made sure
blacks who did crack were far more penalized than whites who could afford
cocaine. Consequently, the prisons were deliberately overloaded with
drug offenders. Disproportionately black. Yet, the former President
and national socialist Republicans who supported this travesty of justice
have rallied to his side during this most recent faux pas.
They think he got it just right. What a crock of shit. Worse?
A re-write of history.

Even Hillary herself has
backed away from support of this goddamned law that turned out to be a
grave mistake. A terrible injustice. Even worse, led to corruption
of police and their cowardly "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality
responsible for the outrageous number of murders committed by our outrageously
corrupt and abusive law enforcement community to this very day.

Yet, not only do the police
remain clueless, so do national socialist, fascist, nazi Republican fools
who still justify this atrocious law and the murders committed by police
currently. Moreover, these goddamned GOP fascist bigots should consider
themselves lucky. Rioters stupidly burned down primarily black communities.
For the most part left unscathed neighborhoods belonging to the very national
socialists responsible for oppressing them.

Why wouldn't they?
They psychotically believe they run and own our formerly great country,
-- and everything and everyone in it. So why wouldn't they be racists,
homophobic bigots, clueless misogynists? What is surprising is the
fact this goddamned bullshit continues to be tolerated. It's 2016.
Not
1950.

4-15-16

FBI Director James B. Comey now claims newer
smartphones than the San Bernardino model would likely not be able to be
hacked into by the 'tool' the FBI bought from its still unidentified lackey
firm. Interesting, isn't it? Apparently, the firm sold its
soul to the devil for thirty pieces of silver. Didn't act out of
principle. Goddamned greed. ... Otherwise, would have donated
the 'tool' to this goddamned traitorous, treasonous, treacherous federal
'law' 'enforcement' agency.

The hypocrisy of this national socialist who
falsely views himself as a 'law' 'enforcement' officer is unparalleled.
Would you believe he admitted to taping the webcam lens of his personal
lap top? Despite the fact this son of a bitch and his goddamned goons
hack into webcams of 'suspects' they're targeting? -- The tape, as
most of us know, make the camera function impossible to hack into.
... Indeed, a word to the wise.

4-8-16

At time of writing, the
FBI announced it will help Arkansas Faulkner County Prosecuting Attorney
Cody Hiland hack a smartphone. There are others waiting for similar
assistance. Not clear what Apple will now do to protect the privacy
of smartphone users. If nothing, then it and its devices cannot be
trusted.

Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly
earned $10.28 million in 2015. Has assets of reportedly approximately
$785 million. To say nothing of the rest of the Apple corporate management
suite. To say nothing of software engineers and others who are paid
extremely well. Time for all these f--kers to get off their financially
portly asses and produce devices with encryption that takes years to hack,
rather than a few days. ... If FBI goons are indeed telling the truth
that a third party successfully did their dirty work for them.

Republican national socialists
claim we're fighting a world war against ISIS. Therefore, the government
should be free to do as it pleases. These clueless cowardly sons
of bitches seem to have forgotten the war against ISIS is not representative
of, nor even close to the level of threat presented by the First and Second
World Wars. Several degrees of magnitude short.

Second, there has been
no declaration of war against ISIS that would grant Congress the power
to force corporations to contribute resources to the war effort.
Third, those special powers were rescinded at the end of both World Wars.
The national socialist bastard who heads the FBI tried to invoke such powers
on Apple. Powers the government does not currently enjoy.
What this traitorous son of a bitch wanted was a back door created by Apple
so he and his goons could hack into any smartphone, -- with or without
a warrant. A goddamned fascist police-state.